New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction 9780773566880

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New World Myth Postmodernism and Postcolonialisrn in Canadian fiction

In this comparative study of six Canadian novels Marie Vautier examines reworkings of myth in the postcolonial context. While myths are frequently used in literature as transhistorical master narratives, she argues that these novels destabilize the traditional function of myth in their self-conscious reexamination of historical events from a postcolonial perspective. Through detailed readings of Francois Barcelo's La Tribu, George Bowering's Burning Water, Jacques Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre, and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People, Vautier situates New World myth within the broader contexts of political history and of classical, biblical, and historical myths. Vautier's emphasis on de-constructing, de-centring, de-stabilizing, and especially de-mythologizing in the study illustrates how New World myth narrators have questioned the past in the present and carried out their original investigations of myth, place, and identity. Underlining the fact that political realities are encoded in the language and narrative of the works, Vautier argues that the reworkings of literary, religious, and historical myths and political ideologies in these novels are grounded in their shared situation of being in and of the New World. MARIE VAUTIER teaches comparative Canadian literature and Quebecois literature at the University of Victoria.

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New World Myth Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction MARIE VAUTIER

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1998 ISBN 0-7735-1669-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-1748-0 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 1998 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been provided by the University of Victoria. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Canada Council's Block Grants program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Vautier, Marie, 1954New world myth : postmodernism and postcolonialism in Canadian fiction Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1669-7 (bnd) ISBN 0-7735-1748-0 (pbk) I. Canadian fiction - 2Oth century - History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism (Literature) - Canada. i. Title. ps8i9i.M97V35 1998 c8i3'.54og 097-900877-8 PR9192.6.M97V35 1998 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

For Nancy, Linda, and l.p.m. And to Joy Kogawa, whom I have met only once, for her courage

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments xxiii 1 Postmodern Myth and Post-European History: Thematics and Theory in the New World 3 2 Making Myths, Playing God: The Narrator in Jacques Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People 57 3 Reshaping Religions, Challenging Cosmogonies: Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre and Joy Kogawa's Obasan 100 4 Political History in the Feminine: Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre and Joy Kogawa's Obasan 155 5 Magic Realism and Postcolonial Challenges to History: George Bowering's Burning Water and Francois Barcelo's La Tribu 202 6 Imagining Myth in the New World: George Bowering's Burning Water and Francois Barcelo's La Tribu 250

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Afterword 285 Notes 289 Bibliography 297 Index 333

Preface

This book is a study of various reworkings of myth in six selected historiographic novels from English-speaking Canada and Quebec, all published in the years 1975-85. It is informed in part by current theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism and in part by my observations of the particularities of the postmodern and postcolonial situations manifested in much contemporary literature from these two areas. Through comparative studies of the six novels, I attempt to illustrate the characteristics of what I call "New World Myth." Many academic studies of myth and literature present myths as immutable, universal stories that originated in the Greco-Roman period of Western history and that are frequently recuperated in epigonic, fictional renditions of the original myths. And, indeed, myths have frequently been employed as teleological and transhistorical master narratives in literature: even studies of historical fictions from "developing nations," to use a Eurocentric term, frequently regard myths as stories that tell us who we are. New World Myth, however, works against traditional assumptions about the universality and transhistoricity of myth, and the most efficient way to illustrate these reworkings, it seems to me, is through close readings of selected texts. The six self-reflexive novels discussed in the chapters that follow destabilize the traditional functions of myth in their reexamination of historical events of the "New World." These novels' explorations of myth signal cognitive instability and ontological and epistemological uncertainty by flaunting their investigative

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reclaimings of the past and their self-conscious awareness of the processes involved in these reclaimings. If, traditionally, myth is a special narrative, most frequently a classical or a biblical story that is seen as eternal, universal, and, especially, transhistorical, then what is New World Myth and what does it have to do with the histories being retold through these fictions? In the context of the fictional works to be examined here, New World Myth could be described as in a perpetual state of coming-intobeing. European accounts of New World historico-political events have long informed the English Canadian and Quebecois mythological universe(s), as has the traditionally dominant Christian belief system. These European-based worldviews no longer entirely suffice, however; hence the creation, in narrative, of New World Myth. In its development, though, New World Myth cannot avoid being part of the older belief system it inherited from the European viewpoint: that is to say, biblical myth and religious ritual, on the one hand, and nonindigenous historico-political accounts of New World happenings on the other. New World Myth must use these systems in order to challenge them. Similar approaches to fiction, history, and myth are found in several contemporary European novels, such as Michel Tournier's Gilles et Jeanne, which reworks the (hi)story of Joan of Arc, and Graham Swift's Waterland, which challenges the very concept of historiography. The fictional challenge to history and the postmodern play with myth is obviously not limited to post-European novels from the New World. The specificity of New World Myth, however, lies in its need to assert itself by flaunting its opposition to the European-inspired versions of the past(s) of the New World. As post-European entities, New World texts from English Canada and Quebec must throw off - at least to a certain extent the assumptions contained in traditional stories about the past(s). New World Myth, then, involves a reclaiming of the past that frequently works against "original" - that is to say, European - versions of past events. In my gradual migration from Eastern Quebec to Victoria, British Columbia (and from French-Quebecois theory to Anglo-AmericanCanadian theory), where I teach Quebecois and comparative Canadian literature and literary theory, I have been intrigued by interesting differences in academic and nonacademic approaches to fiction, theory, culture, and sociopolitical identity. I have also been struck by very different attitudes I observed toward stories that tell us of "our" past(s). Historical figures such as Donnacona, Louis Kiel, LouisJoseph Papineau, Marguerite Bourgeois, Lord Durham, and many others take on very different qualities and defects in alternative

xi Preface versions of their stories. What struck me even more, however, was the ease with which these various versions appeared to coexist and the apparent facility with which many of those who heard the stories could alter and adapt their perceptions of historical "reality" - or, as I would say in French, patiner sur plusieurs surfaces a. lafois. As I argue in "Les Metarecits, le postmoderm'sme, et le mythe postcolonial au Quebec," Michel Tournier's subversion of the myth of Robinson Crusoe in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifismis possible only because there is such a myth, known to all and forming part of the general culture, so to speak, of the West. In contrast, no such mythic certainty has ever informed the stories of the selected corpus of this study. I argue here that myth exchanges its traditional function as transhistorical master narrative (Jean-Francois Lyotard's metarecits; see La Condition postmoderne, 7) for a function characterized by postmodern indeterminacy, complex postcolonial attitudes, a questioning of history, and a developing self-consciousness that creates provisional and relative identities. The analyses I undertake have a double and seemingly contradictory motivation. On the one hand, they examine the manner in which the works studied here foreground their challenges to traditional conceptualizations of myth through their metafictional rewritings of political history. Thus, they analyze the narrators' use of deconstructionist techniques common to much postmodernist fiction: irony, parody, playful self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and the undercutting of the hegemonic patriarchal ideal of the Christian liberal-humanist. There is a partial emphasis on the "de" in the methodology employed here: deconstructing, decentering, destabilizing, and, especially, demythologizing. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, this study seeks to signal the existence of a particular type of work on myth in the selected fictions. To that end, I propose a theory of New World Myth in the preliminary chapter and elucidate it in the analyses that follow. This approach is not exactly in keeping with recent discursive strategies in postmodernist and postcolonial literary practices where typologies of any kind are regarded with deep suspicion. Instead of adopting James Clifford's "collage" technique (Predicament of Culture, 277-346) or Michel Foucault's system of genealogies, however, I prefer to examine methodically and in detail the reworkings of literary, religious, and historical myths and political ideologies in the selected fictions. The general theory of New World Myth presented here evolved gradually from my readings in contemporary literary theory and from parallel readings of many works of fiction from English-speaking Canada and Quebec published in the years 1975-85.

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As I discuss in more detail in chapter i, theories of postmodernism from the Euro-American fields of literary criticism and theories of postcolonialism that originate in former colonies and rapidly become published (recuperated?) in mainstream journals such as Critical Inquiry can be productive for a discussion of the contemporary literatures from English-speaking Canada and Quebec. In the decade in which these works were published, the terms "postmodernism" and "postcolonialism" were not as well known as they are in the 19905. I do not attempt to establish theoretical distinctions between postmodernism and postcolonialism in this work or to chart their "intersecting and diverging trajectories" (Adam and Tiffin, Past the Last Post, vii). Instead, I make use of discursive practices from both fields of study to elucidate the workings of New World Myth. Most comparatists of the literatures from English-speaking Canada and Quebec - and many come to mind (Caroline Bayard, E.D. Blodgett, Jean-Charles Falardeau, Richard Giguere, Barbara Godard, Rosemarin Heidenreich, Eva-Marie Kroller, Clement Moisan, Joseph Pivato, Winfried Siemerling, Antoine Sirois, Sylvia Soderlind, Philip Stratford, Ronald Sutherland, and Christl Verduyn, to name but a selected few) - begin their essays by tackling a basic question: why compare these two literatures? E.D. Blodgett's introductory, and by now classic, essay "The Canadian Literatures as a Literary Problem" (in his Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures) was published near the end of the decade under consideration here. The essay provides a survey of the theoretical history of the field, notes the prevalence of both thematic criticism and the binary pairing of anglophone/francophone writing, proposes a mainly structuralist approach that would stress comparisons among all the Canadian literatures (he opts for in-depth discussions of "minority" writers of Germanic descent - who, nonetheless, write mainly in English), and underlines the need to maintain an open-ended, exploratory attitude to comparative Canadian literature, upheld in his case by notions of "pluralism," "borderlines," and "threshold" (34-5). Blodgett touches upon two points that I wish briefly to consider. The first is his short discussion of thematic criticism; the second, his statement about the relationship between literary theory and ideology. As Barbara Godard points out in her review of Configuration, some of Blodgett's textual analyses recall "that metropolis/hinterland, culture/nature split which has been a characteristic of the much castigated 'thematic criticism' that has followed upon Frye's description of the 'garrison mentality'" (no). In his postscript, Blodgett suggests that the Canadian literatures may indeed require thematic interpretations: "What is more demonstrable than the theme, and what is with increasing

xiii Preface vehemence decried? But does the thematic study appear attractive merely faute de mieux or is there something in these literatures that necessitates it ... Despite all the reserves I have for Kulturgeschichte, and especially its desire to seek national characteristics, I am prompted to say that the Canadian literatures elaborate a profoundly idealistic attitude ... Character is best seen, then, as a rhetorical configuration, the presence of idea as statement, a theme" (220-2). "Myth criticism" has frequently been perceived as synonymous with "thematic criticism" and thus has been decried by both structuralists and poststructuralists. In recent years, however, many novels have signalled a renewed interest in myth, and critical appraisals of that interest are beginning to form a new body of myth criticism.1 The novels themselves call for a study of their various uses of "myth," and to deny them this investigation because it is de rigueur to flog myth criticism is to be unaware of the potential power of certain kinds of myth criticism to deal with postmodernist and postcolonialist tendencies in literature. The six works of fiction 1 examine in this study are Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre (1975); Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People (1977); George Bowering's Burning Water (1980); Francois Barcelo's La Tribu (1981); Jacques Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau (1981); and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981). These novels, while retelling stories of the past in the light of the cultural, historical, fictional, and theoretical concerns of their "present," address and incorporate many of the present philosophical challenges of what has been designated by Lyotard and others as the postmodern age. This investigation centres on the presence of myth, especially selfconscious and ironic work on myth, in these paradoxical novels. Blodgett's point about literary theory and ideology is succinctly made: "What we have been reluctant to assert is not only that literary theory is ideological, but that any literary theory that tries to resolve the problems of nation-states ... must be clear about its ideology" ("Canadian Literatures," 32). In the 19905, however, most theorists are no longer reluctant to assert their ideological stance. Philosophers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and literary theorists, from Michel Foucault to James Clifford, have investigated the relationship between power and knowledge and stressed the need for an awareness of previously occulted presuppositions in any discussions of identity, history, culture, or text.2 Indeed, essentialist notions such as "history" and "culture" are challenged by both Foucault and Clifford, with the latter arguing that any cultural commentator must be aware of the personal and cultural assumptions of the self who writes. The opening sentence of Robert Young's White Mythologies, a

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study of postwar theories of history, underlines the radical shift that has occurred: "In recent years the field of literary and cultural theory has, broadly speaking, been determined by a preoccupation with 'the political'" (vi). In fact, respected literary critics such as Laurie Ricou have signalled, tongue in cheek, the extreme pressure to be political: he titles his contribution to A Mazing Space "Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt and Simultitude: Journal Entries from a Capitalist Bourgeois Patriarchal Anglo-Saxon Mainstream Critic" (205). As an individual born in Quebec whose own sociopolitical outlook was strongly influenced by the nationalist movement of the 19705, two potential areas of contention are of concern to me. This comparative work is written in English, and, as is obvious in its explanatory glosses of Quebecois culture, politics, and language, it is destined primarily for an anglophone audience. Furthermore, it makes generous use of theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism - theories that are much more current in Anglo-American practice and in studies of the new literatures in "english" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 8) than in contemporary francophone studies of Quebecois literature. Although there are some similarities between the concern in the 19903 in Quebec with "les theories de 1'identitaire"3 and the various manifestations of postmodern and postcolonial theoretical investigations in Anglo-American theory, I am aware that this study might well be interpreted in certain quarters as a recuperation of Quebecois fiction - much as Chantal de Grandpre has accused English Canadian critics of canadianizing Quebecois literature in order to meet their own needs for history and culture ("La Canadianisation de la litterature quebecoise," 50-1). Such a recuperation is possible, argues de Grandpre, because English Canadian criticism occults much of the political agenda of Quebecois fiction. The present study does invoke the political contexts of all six works of fiction, situating them in the sometimes highly charged political situations of the day. That said, it is nonetheless obvious to me that many contemporary works of cultural/literary criticism written in English adopt a more personal political stance than I do in this work. No doubt my personal appreciation of the possibility of many different versions of historical reality, a necessary condition of my upbringing, along with my exposure to various schools of cultural and literary criticism, makes of me an autodidact - a "wanderer" in Edward Said's terms - one who is "essentially between homes," who faces "constant transposition ... 'exteriority' and 'inbetweeness'" (Beginnings, 8). This study of postmodern and postcolonial myth in historiographic fictions is undertaken in part because of my own strong fascination with the complex situations of

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politics and culture in Quebec and English-speaking Canada. Nonetheless, scholarship on New World Myth is the principal focus of this work, and, to that end, my efforts have been deployed mainly in illustrating and developing the theory of New World Myth through the reading of selected texts. For instance, while I believe that my choice of novels points to that openness and pluralism so strongly encouraged by Blodgett, I do not dwell at great length on the different racial origins or the possible political agendas of the authors of these novels. I prefer to let the texts speak largely for themselves. Thus, although I discuss Native Peoples' recent challenges to Bowering's portrayal of Amerindians, because it has a bearing on my discussion of New World Myth, I do not necessarily judge or condemn Bowering for his work. My focus is more on how the text Burning Water exploits Eurocentric myths of Aboriginality, than, to quote Eva-Marie Kroller, on "the political responsibilities of the writer" (George Bowering, 84). Nonetheless, the complex situations referred to above bring me to discuss at some length this point, the second of my concerns: the novels' problematic yet intriguing portrayal of the Amerindian figure as a device of postcolonial discourse. Both Sylvia Soderlind (in Margin/Alias) and Linda Hutcheon have noted the presumptuousness of speaking of Canada as if its political situation were equivalent to that of former colonies in the Third World. Hutcheon proposes that the conflation of First World colonialist experience with that of the Third World has "something in [it] that is both trivializing of the Third World experience and exaggerated regarding the Canadian" ("Circling the Downspout of Empire," 155). Hutcheon also raises the issue of the occulted Amerindian, arguing that "when Canadian culture is called post-colonial today, the reference is very rarely (at least explicitly) to the native culture, which might be the more accurate historical use of the term" (Splitting Images, 75). Nowhere is the hesitation between varying postcolonial techniques and agendas more evident than in contemporary fiction's treatment of the figure of the Amerindian and the Metis. In many contemporary novels from English-speaking Canada and Quebec, a self-conscious postcolonial urge to demythologize the superiority of the European or white colonizer and to explore self/other tensions on "home ground" (Mukherjee, "Whose Post-Colonialism?" 6) coexists with a postmodern play with the figure of the Amerindian. Although the historical colonization of the Amerindian and Inuit peoples by the British and French is openly signalled in many contemporary texts (which often challenge the traditions of historiography), they sometimes use the figure of the Amerindian or Metis to

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further the postcolonial arguments of the normative cultural majorities of their traditions. My investigation here centres on what Terry Goldie calls the image of the Amerindian in these works - rather than on "the people the image claims to represent" (Fear and Temptation, 6). In his conclusion to Orientalism, Edward Said asks if "the notion of a distinct culture ... always get[s] involved either in selfcongratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the 'other')" (325). Recent debates about cultural appropriation and the politics of representation tend to sustain this either/or stance, and it is imperative, I believe, to address briefly here the thorny questions of the self/other paradigm and of the appropriation of voice that has been so frequently raised in the 19908. In the decade since the novels discussed in this book were published, the use and abuse of Amerindian characters in fictions by non-Natives has been strongly criticized both within and without First Nations' communities. For instance, Gerald Vizenor condemns W.P. Kinsella's caricature in The Fencepost Chronicles: "Ermineskin is a fictional narrator, but imagination does not absolve racialism; humor is no excuse to exploit negative preconceptions about tribal people. The author plays Indian for a white audience" (Review of The Fencepost Chronicles, 111). Frank Davey's discussion in Post-National Arguments of Margaret Laurence's Diviners "accuses Morag the 'white novelist' of appropriating Jules and Pique's songs when she appends them to her novel, thereby unfairly appropriating the 'signs of connection to the land, aboriginality, inheritance, and 'naturalness' of the indigenes" (Davey, Post-National Arguments, 41; on Davey, see Kortenaar, "Postcolonial Canadian Identity," 20). I have no quarrel with the argument made by Lenore Keeshig-Tobias at the 1992 Vancouver conference on postcolonialism that Amerindian stories are the property of First Nations Peoples and should therefore be told only by them ("The Identity of the Native Voice"). An awareness of and respect for Amerindian copyright systems, I believe, is a necessary component of literary (and other) investigations. I remain intrigued, however, by the presence of the Amerindian and Metis figures in contemporary non-Amerindian literature. Arun Mukherjee's discussion of the limitations of the binary us/ Other argument is pertinent here. While Mukherjee shares the discomfort felt by postcolonial critics such as the authors of The Empire Writes Back with regard to the assimilationist and homogenizing tendencies of postmodernist theory, she objects to their "attempt to create a post-colonial theory that can be applied to 'all' ... postcolonial writing, regardless of the differences of gender, race, class,

xvii Preface caste, ethnicity and sexual orientation" (2). Mukherjee raises an important point. She writes: "When post-colonial theory constructs its centre-periphery discourse, it also obliterates the fact that the postcolonial societies also have their own internal centres and peripheries, their own dominants and marginals" (6). In other words, Mukherjee proposes that when postcolonial theory maintains binary oppositions such as centre/margin, colonizer/colonized, domination/resistance, and so on, it tends to overlook "the cultural work that a post-colonial text does on its home ground" (6). Arguing against the predominant assumption that postcolonial texts are fundamentally engaged in writing back to the centre, Mukherjee warns us not to subscribe to the notion that the preeminent concern of postcolonial texts is to use parody to undercut imperial textuality. She proposes that the privileging of parodic texts limits postcolonial studies to those authors who serve up what the theory calls for, and "despite its best intentions [this restriction] ends up homogenizing and assimilating" (7). Referring at one point to national literatures of India, she writes, "Indian literatures in various languages are not in conversation with a distant outsider but with those at home." They are, like any other literature, in a "dialogic ... relation with other social discourses that circulate in the Indian society rather than with those at the 'centre'" (6). The relationships between non-Amerindian writers from postcolonial countries in the Americas and the Amerindian characters they create or recreate cannot always be reduced to a simplified self/ other, centre/margin(alized) paradigm. Indeed, these dichotomies from postcolonial studies may perhaps hinder some serious reflection on the attempts of non-Aboriginal "mainstream" writers, such as, for instance, Rudy Wiebe or Jacques Poulin, to open up textual space in which to explore various manifestations of differing cultural representations. Thus, Rudy Wiebe's novel, The Temptations of Big Bear, exposes the multitiered colonial situations in Western Canada, while illustrating Eastern Canada's imperialism in Western Canada, white male Western Canadians' patronizing attitudes toward the Cree and toward women of any race, and different races' and groups' perceptions of the same event. Most of Wiebe's novels, including A Discovery of Strangers, indicate various degrees of willingness to explore heterogeneity. Postcolonial studies of The Temptations of Big Bear, however, tend to dwell on the non-Aboriginal status of its author, and to insist on the limitations of its characteristic postcolonial insistence on cross-cultural awareness. Thus, although Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin acknowledge in Decolonizing Fictions that the novel attempts to create "an alternative view of the Other as

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both equal and different" (131), they conclude that "Wiebe's Christianity draws him inevitably toward assimilating the other into the established Christian framework" (134). They note, for instance, that the title of Wiebe's novel offers an "implicit evocation of a Christian context for Big Bear's heroism"(136): he is to somehow be seen simultaneously as both Christian saint and pagan warrior. The overriding pressure of the self/other paradigm in politically correct academic circles appears to be working against the postcolonial practices in texts by mainstream authors such as Laurence and Wiebe, in spite of the fact that they are often praised for their "sensitive responses to Native culture." One senses this in Terry Goldie's question to Daniel Moses, in their prefatory conversation to The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. Discussing their decision not to include works by non-Natives, Goldie says: "On the one hand, Native cultures have certain values and certain powers which can to a certain extent be acquired by a sensitive and creative representation of those cultures, as in the case of Big Bear. But could they be acquired to the degree that they can be presented from the Native culture itself?" (xx). The question remains unanswered and almost unexplored. The preeminent postcolonial theory of the Self/Other dichotomy may perhaps be getting in the way of the attempts by Wiebe, Laurence, and other authors to explore "home-ground" issues and various manifestations of differing cultural representations. The situation in Quebec is somewhat different. It has been suggested that the term postcolonial can hardly be applied to Quebec, given the stormy confrontation between Natives and non-Natives at Kanesatake (Oka) during the summer of 1990.* Racial tensions do exist in Quebec (as they do elsewhere in Canada), and I would agree with Caroline Bayard that although in Quebec "a duly elected Liberal party declared itself, by the end of June 1990, ready to commence negotiations on a different constitutional agreement with the rest of Canada, it still remained that by July 1990 the massive litigations between Native people and the Canadian as much as Quebecois governments had not been attended to ... [The explosive situation at Kanasatake] signalled a profound differend(see Lyotard, Le Differend),which neither the federal government nor the Quebec Liberals nor the PQ knew how to handle" (20). However, Bayard appears here to gloss over the different hierarchial administrative levels of the federal and provincial governments, as well as the diachronical developments in Amerindian/non-Amerindian relations. Until relatively recently, the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs assumed responsibility for all Amerindians living within the territory of Quebec. This produced another Canadian

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irony at the turn of the century: English-speaking Amerindians in Quebec and francophone Amerindians in the West. Normand Delisle notes that even today in Quebec the first nonnative language of the majority of Inuit and Amerindians is still English ("Les langues autochtones/' 3). However, in spite of the politically imposed imperialist and historical split between Amerindians and francophones in Quebec, the figure of the Metis is omnipresent in its contemporary fictions. In Quebec today, two very different sorts of novels present the Amerindian and Metis figures. Some, such as Francine Ouellette's Au nom du pere et du fils, are best-sellers, and their portrayals of Amerindians or, more frequently, Metis are not in the least subtle; they present what Penny Petrone has described as Renaissance Europe's "romanticized image of primeval innocence - the 'bon' sauvage, a Rousseauesque pure being" (Native Literature in Canada, 2). Other contemporary postmodern authors, however, such as Jovette Marchessault and Jacques Poulin, explore the inherent difficulties of living in nonhomogenous societies through their use of Amerindian or Metis characters. I would suggest that the societal and literary apprehensions of the Amerindian in Quebec should not be judged by the criteria that presently dominate in the English-speaking Canadian world. Worldviews can and do differ: as Stephen Richer and Lorna Wier note in the introduction to Beyond Political Correctness, the very term "politically correct," which has produced so much passionate debate in the English-speaking Canadian world, has "no corresponding term in French and [has received] no mass media publicity in Quebec" (18). Indeed, Regine Robin's postface to the 1993 edition of her wellknown novel, La Quebecoite, is an excellent example of the incredulity with which some conceptions of political correctness are received in Quebec. Robin herself is a respected professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, and her fiction is usually characterized as belonging to what has come to be called I'ecriture migrante. Her synthesis of the contemporary situation of the arts in Quebec strongly refutes those notions that have become monnaie courante in Englishspeaking Canada: "appropriation culturelle" (216) and "[un] respect politically correct qui equivaudrait a la mort de la litterature" (222). Instead, Robin invites a cross-cultural dialogue between what she identifies as two major streams of writing in Quebec after 1980: "La grand chance de la litterature quebecoise aujourd'hui est de pouvoir faire dialoguer, meme dans le conflit et la polemique (engueulonsnous, bon Dieu, engueulons-nous, mais au moins commencpns a nous parler) les deux courants de la litterature quebecoise, le courant legitime et I'ecriture migrante, de les faire se metisser, de detisser, se

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ressourcer par cette grande chance d'etre en Amerique" (221). Robin ends her polemical discussion by proposing that Quebecers celebrate this dynamic literature, which, in its always-already-perpetualcoming-into-being, is best defined in terms of "la fiction des bords ... pas seulement des frontieres et des contacts" (224). The binary structures in postcolonial discourse from the international (anglophone) sphere of influence are not prevalent in contemporary francophone texts in Quebec. Novels such as Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues and plays such as Jovette Marchessault's Le Voyage magnifique d'Emily Can frequently present and explore a slippage (the idea is discussed in detail in chapter 5) among what have traditionally been perceived as separate or separable groups. As Bernadette Bucher has argued, the Metis figure is "a la fois ceci et cela, le meme et 1'autre" ("Semiologie du mixte," 308), and thus offers the possibility of a less confrontational perception of difference and multiplicity. I provide a more detailed discussion of this metissage in chapter 3 and, especially, chapters 5 and 6. Indeed, my argument here and in the chapters that follow is that postmodernist parodies of Amerindians might well advance the postcolonial concern of writing back to the centre, but they do not usually facilitate cross-cultural investigations of heterogeneity. However, many contemporary texts by non-Amerindian writers put parody aside in an effort to open up textual space for postcolonial discussions about home-ground issues. Unfortunately, in Englishspeaking Canada, the seemingly wide-scale adoption of the binary us/other theory sometimes impedes the work the novels are carrying out. The figure of the Metis, when it is not strongly marked by postmodernist parody, can facilitate a textual discussion of pluralism in political identity, although as we shall see, its use is exploratory and sometimes problematic. It is important, I believe, to be cognizant of the limitations of the self/other argument in critical appraisals of the multitiered postcolonial situations in English-speaking Canada and Quebec. Of the six novels studied here, some are by fairly well established authors, such as Rudy Wiebe and Jacques Godbout; others, such as those by Jovette Marchessault and Francois Barcelo, have generated little critical commentary. All six thematize historiography and the act of narration, while foregrounding the role of the narrator in the creation of New World Myth. In chapter i, therefore, I examine the conditions that have contributed to the formulation of New World Myth in contemporary fictions from English-speaking Canada and Quebec. A preliminary discussion signals the problematic situation of English Canadian and Quebecois fictions in the current postmodern/

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postcolonial debate. Chapter i also situates New World Myth in the broader context of classical, biblical, and historical myths, provides an overview of "myth and literature" in the French and English traditions, and concludes with a working definition of New World Myth. In Jacques Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People, the narrators overtly proclaim their role as myth-makers and emphasize the didactic nature of their mission. Their self-conscious production of New World Myth, especially through the exploitation of biblical and "primitive" myths and popular political cliches, is examined in chapter 2, as are their reflections on the changing nature of the relationships between the individual and community. The individual/community relationship is also examined in chapter 3, with a brief discussion of metissage and Amerindian and Buddhist mythologies informing the complex political situations portrayed in the novels discussed, Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre and Joy Kogawa's Obasan. In this chapter, I argue that the narrators of these two novels also challenge biblical myth through their use and abuse of the Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmogonies. In chapter 4, the investigations of historiography by these same two narrators, which follow the somewhat circuitous routes of ecofeminism, pantheism, non-rationality speech, silence, and memory, revalorize the feminine in their apprehensions of the political past and present. Many feminist analyses involve the denunciation of patriarchy through work on language, especially in studies of la nouvelle ecriture; I argue here that similar challenges to a patriarchal worldview are discernable in an alternative poetics of the feminine, based on a rediscovery of feminine symbolism. In chapter 5, the exploration of New World Myth focuses on magic realism and postEuropeanism in the retellings of history in Francois Barcelo's La Tribu and George Bowering's Burning Water. I discuss these novels' challenges to teleological evolutionism through the postcolonial technique of slippage. Finally, chapter 6 discusses the role of the artist and the thematization of fact, fancy, and the imagination in the same two metafictions. Their narrators ironically highlight some ethnographic practices in order to foreground the challenge of New World Myth to traditional, European-inspired ethnography through the use of irony, parody, allegory, and metissage. The terminology used in this work is not always entirely to my satisfaction. "Myth," as I have noted, is a slippery term, meaning anything from Mircea Eliade's notion of "tradition sacree, revelation primordiale, modele exemplaire" (Aspects du mythe, 9) to the more contemporary acceptation of "lie, deceit, falsehood." "New World Myth" is even more problematic, as the New World is not/was not

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"new" to everyone. Terms such as "postmodern myth" or "postcolonial myth" however, are not operable here, for reasons that become evident in chapter i. As comparatists such as Blodgett and Stratford have noted, it is somewhat difficult to arrive at acceptable terms for literature written in either English or French in Canada. To simplify matters, I use the terms "English-speaking Canada," "English Canadian," "French Canadian," and "Quebecois" contextually, while acknowledging that such encompassing terms are not necessarily adequate to describe the complex cultural/linguistic situations that were evident in fictions from the years 1975-85 and are yet more obvious today. "Quebecois" is generally applied to works written in French in Quebec after 1960. Before that date, "canadien" or "canadien-frangais" were used. Many commentators use the global term "Canadian" to refer to what I would characterize as works from English-speaking Canada; sometimes Quebecois works are included within that global term. As far as possible, I have indicated within this study whether commentators' remarks refer to English Canadian, French Canadian (prior to 1960), or Quebecois texts. The terms "politics" and "political" also require elucidation. In the late 19805 and 19905, "political" came to have a very wide acceptation, linked as it was to related concepts of feminism, agency, and representation. Rick Salutin defines politics as "that entire area in which we are concerned with the shape and thrust of our society, as far as these are within human control" (Marginal Notes, 5). In my work here, however, "political" adheres to the more limited acceptation it usually had during the years 1975-85; I use it when referring to power relationships between defined groups, as in "federalprovincial politics." The language of quotation is equally problematic in comparative studies. I quote for the most part from the original texts, assuming that readers of this study will have sufficient knowledge of French and English. Furthermore, the close analyses I present here require the use of the original language. Occasionally, however, I use a readily available English translation of a theoretical work that was originally published in French. For the reader's convenience, my translations of the passages in Spanish are provided in the text of the study.

Acknowledgments

Many of the ideas in this study were first generated during my doctoral studies at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and I am grateful to friends and colleagues there for the stimulating environment and the intellectual support they provided. I once again thank Linda Hutcheon, J.E. Chamberlin, and Janet M. Paterson for their insightful readings of my initial research, although it must be noted that this study has evolved greatly since its first inception. Linda Hutcheon's work on postmodernism has influenced my work on myth, and I offer her my deeply affectionate thanks for the many ways in which she has supported my work. I wish to acknowledge research grants from the University of Victoria. A warm thank you is extended to all the friends and colleagues with whom I have had useful discussions about postmodernism, postcolonialism, New World Myth, and the literatures of Englishspeaking Canada and Quebec. I thank my colleagues in the Departments of French Language and Literature, English, and History for their support. In particular, I express my gratitude to Dr Elizabeth Vibert for her generous help. I am grateful to the excellent research librarians at the University of Victoria's McPherson Library and particularly wish to thank Don White and Ken Cooley for their muchappreciated aid in tracking down elusive references. I also thank my three research assistants, Karyn Marczak, Andrew Gibbs, and Mary MacDonald, whose company I very much enjoyed and whose skills in library research and computer technology have contributed to this project.

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Some of the ideas in this book have appeared in either French or English in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en litterature canadienne, Canadian Ethnic Studies, and in Les Discours feminins dans la litterature postmodeme au Quebec, edited by Raija Koski, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth. I am grateful to the editors of these pubications for their interest in my work and also to audiences in Montreal, Quebec, Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Charlottetown, Victoria, Leiden (The Netherlands), Seattle, Tucson, and La Martinique for their support.

New World Myth [La] liberte commence la ou les certitudes s'achevent. Pierre Hebert, "Probleme de semiotique diachronique"

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i Postmodern Myth and Post-European History: Thematics and Theory in the New World

In the 19605 and early 19703 most thematic studies of the literatures of Quebec and of English-speaking Canada, from Gilles Marcotte's Une Litterature qui sefait and Jean-Charles Falardeau's Notre Societe et son roman to Margaret Arwood's Survival and John Moss's Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction, considered the problematic question of national identity to be a central issue. In the second half of the 19703 thematic criticism in both English Canada and Quebec began to give way to European-inspired structuralist interpretations. "Beyond thematics" was the place to which most critics in English Canada suddenly were expected to aspire, according to Russell Brown, although, as he himself notes, most did not get there ("Critic, Culture, Text," 175). In Quebec, applying what were commonly called des grilles d'analyse, largely inspired by the Tel Quel group, was de rigueur for literary academics in the 19703. This shift from content to form, often inspired by the works themselves, was productive for many critical approaches. The thorny questions of cultural identity and nationalist politics, however, continued to hover beneath the Barthian surfaces of many contemporary English Canadian and Quebecois texts. During the 19703 and 19805, the novel, in particular, was instrumental in simultaneously constructing and challenging nationalist notions in what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities." In the 19803, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and, more importantly to my argument here, the emergence of postmodernist and postcolonial theories and practices opened the door to renewed interest in the question of national identities in the literatures of

4 New World Myth

English-speaking Canada and Quebec - but an interest with a difference. As Linda Hutcheon noted, the "entire question of Canadian identity ha[d] become a kind of playground - or battlefield - for the postmodern as well as the post-colonial defining of 'difference' and value" ("'Circling the Downspout of Empire/" 166). The complexities of these areas of investigation - identity, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and myth - form the basis of the present study. M. Jeanne Yardley has noted the persistence of thematic criticism in comparative Canadian literary studies and the accompanying search for literary emblems. She recalls the various geometric figures that have been proposed as models for the "relationship between the two major Canadian literatures": Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauvreau's double spiral staircase, Jean-Charles Falardeau's horizontal and vertical axes, Philip Stratford's double helix on the DNA model, and E.D. Blodgett's idea of a lattice-work fence (Yardley, "The Maple Leaf," 252-5). Signalling Blodgett's willingness to leave models behind when appropriate, Yardley underlines the insufficiencies of searching out such emblems as a critical enterprise, noting their necessarily exclusive effect on the choice of the canon. In remarks that strike closer to home, Yardley describes the prolificacy and the limitations of myth-oriented criticism in studies of Canadian literature, noting that such criticism is frequently practised along Frygian lines and "tends to reduce all texts to a single story" (258). The present study investigates the presence of New World Myth in contemporary fictional works. Although one of the issues foregrounded in the six novels under consideration here is the double problematic of myth and national identity, this study seeks to examine various ways in which these contemporary fictions strive to destabilize the accepted workings of traditional myth. Any university library will list hundreds, if not thousands, of works under the generic heading "myth." Where, then, does one begin? One of Said's early texts, Beginnings, published in the first year of the decade examined in this study, may be of some help here. Although I appreciate Jonathan Culler's criticism of Beginnings - a criticism taken up by several other reviewers - that it is "a manuscript in search of an editor, a sprawling work whose title claims for it a unity that it never quite achieves" (Culler, "Beginnings," 502), Said's discussion of beginnings is useful to this contemporary study of myth. Giambattista Vice's remark in The New Science that "doctrines must take their beginnings from that of the matters of which they treat" is the epigraph to Said's book. Vice's distinction between "the gentile or historical and the sacred or original" parallels Said's distinction between beginning and an origin (Beginnings, 357). Said

5

Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

argues that "beginning and beginning-again are historical whereas origins are divine ... [and] a beginning not only creates but is its own method because it has intention" (xiii). Origins lay claim to truth, whereas beginnings "are necessary fictions reflecting above all the desire to begin, a decision to break with a past and initiate a future" (Culler, "Beginnings," 303). Said encourages the courageous act of creating or imagining beginnings rather than seeking absolute origins. In his wide-ranging discussion Said shows how the novel has evolved from its classical form (based in autobiography, in life-story) to one wherein a beginning is motivated both by individual agency and a self-conscious awareness of the precariousness of writing as an enterprise. There is a strong tension in the novel between the authority proclaimed by the novelist, which is based on the power to create, to control, to intend, and what Said calls molestation, which he defines as "a consciousness of one's duplicity, one's confinement to a fictive, scriptive realm, whether one is a character or a novelist" (Beginnings, 84). Said's comments apply not only to the numerous European and American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that make up his corpus but also to the authors of fictions and of literary and cultural commentary/criticism/theory. For Said beginnings do intend meaning: "A beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning" (5), but these beginnings are provisional, marked by discontinuity, nonlinearity, disjunction. They are also marked by an intentional determination, by an intellectual "appetite" that is "always engaged purposefully in the production of meaning" (12). Writers of texts, according to Said, are increasingly aware of the burden of self-consciousness and their inability to create their work out of - and to insert it into - a long and harmonious tradition of literature and scholarship. Thus, the emphasis in the last chapter on Vico - that "first philosopher of beginnings" (Beginnings, 350) - as an autodidact echoes the observations in the preliminary chapter on the absence of the security of tradition for the contemporary critic, that necessary "wanderer" (8). As Welsey Morris implies, the critical, if mitigated, success of Said's Beginnings is perhaps due in part to its endorsing an approach that frees the American critic from the burden of European tradition: "The typical American strategy is to substitute new, 'written/ identities for the vitiating historical (generational) truth of our borrowed European ones" (Morris, "Beginnings," 743). Precisely because the modern literary critic cannot sustain himself or herself in a "dynastic tradition" (Said, Beginnings, 13), a different topos must be sought out. For Said this topos is the beginning: "Beginnings inaugurate a deliberately other production of meaning - a gentile (as opposed to a

6 New World Myth sacred) one ... A beginning, therefore, is a problem to be studied, as well as a position taken by any writer." The concepts Said uses to formulate his theoretical concerns origin/beginning(s), divine/historical, tradition/autodidact, authority/molestation - can be applied to the novels examined in this study, as well as to this study itself. Traditional myth criticism portrays myths as true stories, as sacred narratives about the actions of the gods, as explicatory models or explanations of the origins of the universe. New World Myth, however, opposes this origin/divine paradigm with one focused on beginning(s), on the historical. The narrators of New World Myth flaunt the precariousness of their beginnings while alluding to histories, to narratives, and to the act of writing. This is evident in the prologue to Burning Water, where the speaker reflects on his feeling that "current history and self were bound together, from the beginning" and then asks rhetorically, "How could I begin to tell such a story? I asked myself. Books do have beginnings, but how arbitrary they can be." Said's third theoretical concern, the liberating advantage enjoyed by today's critics and novelists by virtue of being autodidacts (as opposed to being obliged to insert themselves into literary or theoretical traditions), is equally foregrounded in the texts of this corpus. Jovette Marchessault's narrator, like all New World Myth narrators, has a highly cynical attitude toward "book-learning," the written word, universities, and academics. This narrator, like Marchessault herself and like Said's contemporary critic, is both an autodidact and a "wanderer" in the geographical, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual domains. New World Myth is marked by the deliberate intention to break with mythic and historical traditions and to address the here and now, to take - to paraphrase Vico - "its beginnings from that of the matters of which it treats." While these narrators display a selfconscious awareness of the precariousness of their enterprise, they are motivated to embark upon the courageous act of creating New World Myth rather than to seek absolute origins by turning to literary or mythic traditions. Said's remarks on authority and molestation, while interesting in their applications to the works he studies, are only partially applicable to New World Myth works. He describes a sense of authority on the part of the novelist, who is conscious of a personal power to initiate, establish, and control the "product" (Beginnings, 83) but who is also affected by the "consciousness of one's duplicity, one's confinement to a fictive, scriptive realm" (84). Said's discussions, however, are based mainly on works produced in the modernist EuroAmerican literary mainstream. In contrast, New World Myth texts

7 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

are the products of more marginal cultures, and they do not reflect a similar blanket confidence in their political or literary power to control and to intend. Nonetheless, as is discussed in more detail below, these texts are marked, paradoxically, by both a strong motivation to didacticism about the historical past (which they do not perceive as confined to the fictive realm) and by an ubiquitous selfconsciousness regarding the creation, through fiction, of New World Myth. Said portrays literary critics as scholars aware of the discontinuities of their training and no longer able to insert themselves into any one strong tradition. They are thus perhaps more easily enabled to make a beginning, in spite of their consciousness of the probable frailty of the project. Thus, a critic must accept "the risks of rupture and discontinuity" (Beginnings, 34) because, "for the writer, the historian, or the philosopher the beginning will emerge reflectively ... already engaging him [or her] in an awareness of its difficulty" (35). I am certainly aware of the shaky uncertainty of the beginnings that are portrayed in much of Said's work: there is a definitive break in tradition in this "beginning" of mine, as my definition and illustrations of New World Myth do not insert themselves into the accepted tradition of myth criticism. This study of New World Myth was begun in an exploratory way and was formulated gradually through repeated readings of the texts themselves, so that this introductory chapter was not the first chapter of the work to be written. In this way, the theory of New World Myth, to paraphrase Vico yet once again, took its beginnings "from that of the matters of which [it] treat[s]." Where, then, to begin? First, by noting the slippery quality of the term "myth": it can - and does - mean anything from sacred story to outright lie. Second, by an overview of myth criticism and an examination of work in the field that pertains to the literatures of English-speaking Canada and Quebec. Third, by reflecting on what some contemporary authors have to say about myth. And fourth, and most importantly, by provisionally describing the perameters of what I call New World Myth. A B R I E F H I S T O R Y OF M Y T H

In classical times, the Greeks initially equated mythos with true stories of the gods, but according to Mircea Eliade, from the time of Xenophanes "the Greeks steadily continued to empty mythos of all religious and metaphysical value" (Myth and Reality, i). Slowly, a distinction came to be made between mythos (which has unquestioned validity) and logos (whose validity can be proved), and later,

8 New World Myth between mythos and historia. "Myth," says Eliade, came to signify something that cannot truly exist (2). According to Kees Bolle and Richard Buxton, few innovative theoretical perspectives on myth were developed during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Instead, in both periods interpretations of myth in terms of allegory or of Euhemerism (according to which certain gods were originally great people who benefited mankind) tended to predominate. This, of course, enabled Christians to incorporate myths from "the culturally authoritative" past into the Christian framework while demythologizing the gods of that past ("Myth and Mythology," 712). Myth came to be a central focus of literature in the Western world with the rise of European Romanticism, and it grew in importance to literary studies from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, with the heyday of myth criticism occurring from the 19403 to the 19703. Myth criticism first centred on classifying stories from the Greco-Roman tradition ("classical" myths) and on associating the gods of these stories with strong emotions: thus, Aphrodite represented desire, Athena, wisdom, and so forth. Myths were also linked to contemporary European folk tales and to anthropological studies of stories believed to be true in precontact cultures. Greco-Roman myths from antiquity and nineteenth-century folktales from popular cultures "were regarded by the Romantics as repositories of experience far more vital and powerful than those obtainable from what was felt to be the artificial art and poetry of the aristocratic civilization of contemporary Europe" (Bolle and Buxton, "Myth and Mythology," 713). At the turn of the century, one notes a proliferation of dictionaries of classical myths, as well as the publication of seminal anthropological works such as Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which was originally published in 1890, grew to twelve volumes by 1915, and was abridged into one volume in 1922. Frazer's powerful impact on twentieth-century English language writers and critics was considerable, as John B. Vickery has illustrated in The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Working with information obtained from missionaries and anthropologists visiting nonEuropean countries, Frazer proposed a diachronic development of three modes of thought: magical, religious, and scientific. Drawing on descriptions of ritual practices of precontact communities, The Golden Bough attempts to reconstruct elements of precontact worldviews by an examination of myths and rituals. For instance, according to Frazer, many geographically separated "primitive tribes" believed that the well-being of their communities depended upon the vitality of the king who led them, and therefore a community

9 Post-Modem Myth and Post-European History needed to slay its leader when his strength began to lessen, in order to replace him with a healthy successor whose vigour assured that of the "tribe." Frazer's studies of myth and ritual name, classify, and draw parallels among various ritualistic "figures" such as the divine king, the stranger, the virgin, the hanged man, the corn-mother, and the scapegoat. Northrop Frye, writing in 1957, notes that although The Golden Bough "purports to be a work of anthropology ... it has had more influence on literary criticism than in its own alleged field, and it may yet prove to be really a work of literary criticism" (Anatomy of Criticism, 109). While The Golden Bough's theories of the evolutionary sequence of thought are now unsatisfactory to anthropological studies - to say nothing of Frazer's eurocentric appreciation of non-european cultures - the influence of the text can easily be traced in the writings of twentieth-century modernists: Eliot, Conrad, Faulkner, Joyce, Pound, and D.H. Lawrence, among many others.1 Indeed, much Anglo-American myth criticism of the early to mid-twentieth century consisted of seeking out and commenting on parallels between Frazer's work and the contemporary novels and poetry of the time. The Golden Bough allowed critics to explore the magical and fascinating world of evil, spirits, sex, and unbridled emotions at the same time as it implied the cultural superiority of the (mainly European) world of the anthropologist. The second major enterprise of midcentury Anglo-American work on myth was to comment on the frequently ironic allusions to myths of the Greco-Roman classical period and then to establish and elaborate on the relationships between myth and structure in the novel. This practice has come to be called the "'myth and symbol school' of American Studies, which had its heyday around the middle part of [the twentieth] century" (Hestetun, A Prison-House of Myth? 19).2 The collected essays in John Vickery's Myth and Literature can be seen as an exemplar of this period: they present an interesting blend of Frazer-inspired myth criticism and studies of narrative structure. His later work, Myths and Texts, draws together many earlier essays from the myth and symbol period; its separate chapters discuss those subjects dear to New Criticism, such as structure, theme, character, narrative, and point of view. In a slightly different vein, John White's influential Mythology in the Modern Novel discusses how novelists used established myths as symbolic comments on modern events. The emphasis on structure in myth studies of the modernist period, along with this era's typical disregard for history, was underlined by the creative waiters of the period themselves, as is seen in T.S. Eliot's famous comment in his 1923 review of Joyce's Ulysses: "[Myth] is

io New World Myth simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance of the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" ("Ulysses, Order and Myth," 201). In 1991, Bernard Accardi et al. published an annotated bibliography that provides a useful overview of material in the field. The continuing centrality of Northrop Frye's work is underlined in the introduction: in what new directions has post-modernism, or late or decadent modernism, taken the study of literature in relation to myths? Northrop Frye, of course, both acclaimed and disavowed by such post-modern avatars as Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, stands at the centre of this stage ... By 1970 increasing uneasiness had set in with Frye's archetypal criticism, heralded by William Wimsatt's acerbic critique in Northrop Frye and Modern Criticism ... At the same time, the first generation of Frye's students and readers had begun developing their own ideas about his themes, often working with investigative tools and techniques unknown or unused two decades earlier. (Recent Studies in Myths and Literature, vii) Frye's work on myth and literature continues to generate much discussion among theorists, and his influence on Canadian literature and theory are discussed elsewhere in this study. Myth criticism of the myth and symbol school faded away during the heyday of structuralism (approximately, from 1965 to the end of the 19703), and Anglo-American theories of myth began to be strongly influenced by French structuralists such as Claude LeviStrauss. In poststructuralist times, myth has made a singular comeback in Anglo-American cultural and literary studies, as is evidenced by the thousands of entries in Accardi's annotated bibliography, which, incidentally, deals only with myths in literature. Thus, the compilers of the bibliography omit Joseph Campbell's work on myth, although Campbell has become a quasi guru of New Age spiritualists, and his books and audiovisual presentations have contributed to the new interest in myth in recent years. Although Accardi et al. argue that "in later years he [Campbell] tended to use literary texts chiefly to support his general theories about human nature" (Recent Studies in Myths and Literature, vii-viii), Robert Segal's comparison of Campbell and Frazer states that Campbell's "impact on literary scholars has likewise been vast, though far more confined," with most of his followers applying his hero-myth pattern (from The Hero with a Thousand faces) to novels and movies (Segal, "Frazer and Campbell on Myth," 471.)

ii Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, investigations of myth written in French were based loosely on the same two elements studied in the Anglo-American world of myth criticism: a strong interest in the Greco-Roman period,3 and anthropological studies of religious and mythic practices from what were then commonly called "primitive" cultures. Mircea Eliade is the best-known practitioner of the latter approach, and the comparative, eclectic approach he adopted is representative of many twentieth-century French studies of myth.4 Eliade's work betrays a strong belief in the superiority of the European vis-a-vis non-European cultures; as late as 1963 he could write with impunity about how "'primitive' mythologies" [had been] transformed and enriched ... under the influence of higher cultures" (Myth and Reality, 4; my emphasis). Eliade's work follows upon that of anthropologists and philosophers like Lucien Levy-Bruhl (La Mentalite primitive) and Marcel Mauss (Essai sur le don). Their emphasis is on a combination of Eurocentric anthropology and the relationship between myth and world religions. Indeed, in the French tradition from the late nineteenth century to the era of structuralism, studies of myth were more frequently associated with studies of comparative religion than with literary criticism.5 There is not one central figure in mid-twentiethcentury French myth criticism whose influence was comparable to that of Northrop Frye in the Anglo-American world, but those scholars who focused on myth and literature generally read contemporary works of French literature in the light of classical myths.6 Major changes occurred in French approaches to literary criticism after May 1968, as the structuralist-inspired nouvelle critique led to new investigations of literature. In the 19605 and 19705, the main promoter of la mythocritique was the long-time director of the Centre de recherche sur l'imaginaire, Gilbert Durand, in works such as Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire and Figures mythiques et visages de I'ceuvre. A philosopher-anthropologist who has called himself a structuraliste mitige, Durand argued against what has come to be called la mythanalyse, which is in fact the term more closely associated with linguistics and the formal studies of structuralism. Durand's work in mythocritique elaborates a theory of necessary dualism wherein a human being is torn by contradictory psychobiological needs and desires that inevitably lead to conflict. For Durand, nature and culture are in opposition, and myth is seen as a way of containing, if not abolishing, the basic conflict between the biological and collective aspects of the individual in society. He studies content as opposed to form and considers myths diachronically,

12 New World Myth

not synchronically. Although Durand's work is again more anthropological than literary, his early essays on "les structures de 1'imaginaire" encouraged a myth criticism that studied myths and symbols as dynamic, changing entities. Claude Levi-Strauss is the critic most closely associated with myth during the structuralist period. In sharp contrast to previous studies of myth, his work focused not on the meaning, significance, or symbolism pertaining to a particular myth but on the underlying relationships among the basic elements of myths (predicate statements he called mi/themes), and then on the reticulated means by which the myths of given culture or cultures interrelate. Working with an elaborate system of binary oppositions, he strove to establish a "grammar" of mythical language, that is to say, to discover the rules and laws that govern the system of signs used in "le discours mythique": he was a la recherche du "sens cache derriere le sens" (L'Homme nu, 581). Despite the strong insistence on structural linguistics, information theory, and even cybernetics in Levi-Strauss's work and despite its strong privileging of form over substance, its formal characteristics cannot be divorced from the Eurocentric bias in his supposedly empirical ethnographical research in works like Tristes Tropiques.7 In La Vote des masques he offers the reader a eurocentric appreciation of the ceremonial masks of First Nations people, mainly those of the West Coast of Canada. In Paris in 1989, the Musee de 1'Homme presented Les Ameriques de Claude Levi-Strauss, an exhibition that, in my opinion, could be critiqued along the lines of Hutcheon's discussion of the exhibition Into the Heart of Africapresented at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1989-90 (Hutcheon, "The Post Always Rings Twice") or Kwame Anthony Appiah's appreciation of Perspectives: Angles on African Art, organized in 1987 by the Centre for African Art in New York (Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"). Both Hutcheon and Appiah note the complexities of the politics of representation of ethnic groups in museum settings (Hutcheon, 207). However, Jean Guiart, the cocurator of the Ameriques-Levi-Strauss exhibition, appears to continue the us/them practices of Eurocentric ethnography in his brief introduction to the exposition: "il fallait ... montrer combien les autres, les hommes rouges, jaunes ou noirs faussement oublies par ce que nous appelons 1'Histoire, avaient accumule de capacites rationnelles dans leurs technologies et dans leurs systemes de representations collectives" ("Les Ameriques," i). Levi-Strauss's studies of the "logic of myth" (Mythologiques, not Mythologies)proposes that all the variant forms of a myth have a common structural nexus and to work on

13 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

myth is to discover its common structure. This push to homogenization and universality is not characteristic of New World Myth. Perched between structuralist and poststructuralist practices, Roland Barthes's work opened the door to cultural critiques of French petit bourgeois society. His vignettes of "new" myths of French daily life, such as "The World of Wrestling" or "Striptease" in Mythologies, were intended to expose the parasitic, fraudulent and polluting presence of contemporary myths. Thus, myths cover the traces of their fabrication and the historicity of their production: they hypocritically pretend that they are the norm, that they represent eternal verities, when in fact they simply reflect (or - in the case of publicity slogans - exaggerate) the petit bourgeois mentality. Barthes quickly moved from an effort to reveal the duplicity of myth in language to an extended critique of how signes and significations) operate on social levels, developing his theories in "Elements de semiologie." Barthes' intent to shock the complacent (French?) reader by discovering new myths in quotidian life presupposes the notion that myths are usually understood as assuming the guise of natural or absolute truths. Again, New World Myth makes no such assumptions. In Beginnings, Edward Said discusses the death of the "dynastic tradition" for the literary critic (13) and the preeminence of "paraknowledge [that] ... lies naturally alongside literature and in some way bears upon it" (7). These same comments apply to the very extended field of myth criticism in the twentieth century, for, as Eric Gould notes, "myth is now so encyclopedic a term that it means everything or nothing" (Mythical Intentions, 5). This supposed ubiquity of myth is due in part to the related fields of paraknowledge with which it came to be associated in the twentieth century and which, due to lack of space and to the fact that their primary focus is on matters other than literature, are not discussed here at any length.8 Accardi's bibliography, which annotates thousands of entries of work by mainly English-speaking authors within Britain and the United States, signals three traditional camps into which contemporary studies of myth fall: literature as an extension of mythology, literature as saving us from mythology, and structuralist studies of myth as linguistic form. It does make brief mention of new directions in myth criticism, such as a willingness to study biblical elements as myths in literature (see Frye's Great Code) and a growing body of feminist studies that may promote the goddess or Earth Mother myth, critique the patriarchal aspects of traditional myths of the

14 New World Myth

hero, or revisit other fields of paraknowledge, such as psychology, in an attempt to create or recreate myth from a feminist point of view.9 Accardi's survey, while useful for an examination of contemporary mainstream studies of myth, does not discuss much myth criticism outside the Euro-American sphere. One must look elsewhere for contemporary postmodern and postcolonial appreciations of myth in literature. As Sylvia Soderlind has pointed out, there is an ambiguous attitude to myth in postcolonial literature, which is "frequently busy dismantling both the myths and the literary models of the colonizer; postcolonial parodies of metropolitan canonical texts are by now numerous enough to form their own anti-canon" (Margin/Alias, 18). Let us turn now to the specifics of myth criticism in Quebec and English-speaking Canada. In the 19603 literary criticism in Quebec was very strongly influenced by France's nouvelle critique, due in large part to the fact that many of the first generation of lay university professors had done their graduate work in Paris. La mythocritique was only one of a series of neologisms that defined the "new" hermeneutical and structuralist tools for literary analysis. In the 19705, studies in mythocritique/ mythanalyse generally followed two streams: a broadly thematic, interpretive criticism, based in large part on the writings of Eliade and on the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard (L'Eau et les reves', La Psychanalyse du feu) and Georges Poulet (Etudes sur le temps humain; Les Metamorphoses du cercle), or a more scientific, structuralist approach based on the writings of Durand and Levi-Strauss. Myth criticism, however, was not among the popular structuralist approaches in vogue at that time, for three reasons: the frequent conflation of myth and the sacred (a la Eliade) at a time when the Quebecois intelligentsia was distancing itself from Catholicism and the Church; the wish to appear scientific and structured in one's study of literature, and thus to avoid hard-to-define, "folksy," quasireligious terms such as myth, and third, the strong insistence on le texts as ecriture, whereas myth was associated with - or, according to Barthes, defined as - une parole (Mythologies, 215). In the early 19905, however, one finds some generalized studies of myth in contemporary literature from Quebec, such as Victor-Laurent Tremblay's Au commencement etait le mythe and Antoine Sirois's Myths et symboles dans la littemture quebecoise. Occasional monographs are devoted to individual authors' use of myth, such as Paul Socken's The Myth of the Lost Paradise in the Novels of Jacques Poulin, Maurice Emond's La Femme a lafenetre: I'univers symbolique d'Anne Hebert, and Franza Marcato-Falzoni's work on Rejean Ducharme, Du Mythe au roman: une trilogie ducharmienne, originally published in Italian). And

15 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

of course, there are several articles in prestigious journals dealing with various myths - usually classical or religious - in Quebecois fiction. All these studies, however, offer traditional approaches to myth. Sirois, for instance, proposes to study the influence of classical myths and biblical stories on the major writers of Quebec (11). Tremblay's work applies contemporary theories of myth and culture (Durand, Rene Girard, and Mikhail Bakhtin) in interesting ways to a traditional Quebecois corpus (1896-1933), but he too seeks to illustrate the universality of myth in his development of a theory of mythanalyse globule (53). Socken's work on myth here and elsewhere is closely tied to Biblical hermeneutics; Emond follows the methods of Bachelard and Durand; and Marcato-Falzoni's study echoes Gusdorf's theory of ages of human thought, in that the order in which Ducharme's novels were written supposedly reflects an evolution from myth through religion to history. In fact, during the contemporary period (from 1960 to the 19905), few critics from Quebec or from English-speaking Canada have analyzed the impending change in the treatment of myth in contemporary fictions, although creative writers were beginning to foreground discussions of the very concept of myth.10 NORTHROP FRYE, LITERATURE,

AND

MYTH

During the same contemporary period, few critical, in-depth studies of myth in contemporary literature in English-speaking Canada were published. Some works of criticism, such as George Woodcock's Odysseus Ever Returning, simply used the well-known elements of classical myth to structure their own evaluative studies of literature published during the mid-twentieth century, without specifically referring to the uses of myth in the texts. Revealingly, there is no entry under "Myth" in William Toye's Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, although there are sections entitled "Folklore" and "Indian Legends and Tales." Donna Bennett's sweeping overview, "Criticism in English," in that volume underlines the importance of a group of scholars whose "criticism blends Frye's mythic or archetypal analysis with his concept of a 'thematic' criticism" (160). These "major 'thematicists,'" according to Bennett, were "more interested in developing a thesis about national identity than in participating in literary analysis" (160): D.G. Jones (Butterfly on Rock), Margaret Atwood (Survival), and John Moss (Patterns of Isolation). Northrop Frye's influence is noticeable here. There is almost universal agreement among critics of various backgrounds and persuasions about Frye's significance in

16 New World Myth twentieth-century studies. Since his death in Toronto in 1991, several recent publications have confirmed his status in the fields of criticism, theory, and cultural studies.11 Frye's numerous works on myth and literature, including Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, and Words with Power, along with several volumes of collected essays, were a major contributing factor in the importance given to myth in Western literary studies of the later half of the twentieth century. In Anatomy Frye examines what are for him the principles of criticism through lengthy discussions of the modes of literature: the historical, the ethical, the archetypal or mythopoeic, and the rhetorical or classificatory. It is difficult to separate out Frye's theory of myth per se from his prolific writings on criticism as a creative and investigative act, on mythology, literature as a system, and, in his later years, on the relationship between mythology and ideology. Nonetheless, his basic (and frequently repeated) arguments about myth have not changed greatly since the publication of Anatomy. For Frye, myth always means mythos, story, plot, narrative. Myths are immutable, transhistorical, and frequently pastoral and nostalgic. As Frye writes in the last book published in his lifetime, "To me myth is not simply an effect of the historical process, but a social vision that looks toward a transcending of history, which explains how it is able to hold two periods of history together, the author's and ours, in direct communication. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to suggest a social vision of this kind, even within ideology, without invoking some kind of pastoral myth, past or future" (Words with Power, 60-1). Recent retrospective appraisals of Frye's very impressive body of work laud his contributions "as a theorist of culture and renovator of humanistic studies in the second half of our century" (White, "Frye's Place," 28), while frequently acknowledging that his grand project, the systemization of literary studies, is not a la mode in today's cultural studies programs. Thus, Catherine Belsey (Critical Practice), Fredric Jameson (The Political Unconscious), and Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory) have all respectfully taken Frye to task for his privileging of mythology over ideology and history - for what they perceive as his deep belief in the autonomy of literature and culture and therefore his supposed lack of sociopolitical engagement. Eagleton writes, "In one sense, [Frye's approach] is scornfully 'anti-humanist,' decentring the individual human subject and centring all on the collective literary system itself; in another sense it is the work of a committed Christian humanist" - one whose writings are marked by a distaste for the actual social world and for history (Literary Theory, 93).

17 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History While Frye's reputation as a critic of importance is evident, there is much less general agreement about the worth of his contributions to the field of specifically Canadian/Quebecois criticism. On the one hand, Frye's inordinate influence on an entire generation of writers from English-speaking Canada is widely acknowledged. Woodcock, for instance, notes in 1964 that Frye's important "myth-based criticism, carried on for many years in periodicals like the University of Toronto Quarterly and Canadian Forum, [had] not merely set its mark deeply on Canadian critical writing in its early stages; it was also largely responsible for the appearance of a whole school of mythopoeic poets, led by James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, and Eli Mandel" (Odysseus, 2). Although Reaney and, especially, Mandel later distanced themselves from the Frygian school of myth criticism, there is no doubt that Frye influenced many writers from English-speaking Canada, as is obvious, for instance, in the very structure of Margaret Atwood's 1970 novel Surfacing, From a later perspective Robert Lecker writes in 1991 that "Frye himself participates in topocentrism and nineteenth-century cultural theories ... Hence Frye's criticism is both a symptom of the forces producing the dominance of romance and mythopoeia in Canadian fiction, and a contributing causal factor" (Canadian Canons, 201). On the other hand, as Barbara Godard notes, "Frye himself changed hats when he came to talk about Canadian literature, leaving behind his structuralist typologies to wade into the waters of cultural history" ("Configuration," no). Blodgett, discussing Frye's conclusion to the first edition of Klinck's Literary History of Canada (1965), proposes that Frye felt constrained "to abandon the leading principle of the Anatomy and assert that Canadian literature 'is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as part of the autonomous world of literature'" (Frye, "Conclusion," 1965, 822; Blodgett, "European Theory," 6). Blodgett goes on to propose that the point of departure for all Canadian critics "within the Frygian dispensation" is the colonial mentality (7), a point to which I shall return. Frye's evaluative approach to Canadian literature, particularly in that first conclusion, has been strongly challenged in recent years. Thus, Heather Murray argues that one must conclude that English Canadian literature "does not measure up to Frye's notion of literature" and that in Frye's view, Canadian literature is "unorthodox, slightly failed or fallen short" ("Reading for Contradiction," 73). Rosemary Sullivan proposes that, in effect, Frye defines the Canadian mentality as one of "defeat, denial, withdrawal/' with Canadian writers "locked into a demythologized environment" ("Northrop Frye," 10). Although Frye's influence is frequently perceived as being of the

i8 New World Myth

old school in today's postmodern critical circles, there is no doubt that his double negation of the importance of Canadian writing admittedly in 1965 - had consequences for literature and Canadian criticism in the past, as his opinions were transmitted widely to Canadians through his teachings, writings, and disciples. Frye first excludes Canadian literature from that "autonomous world of literature" he constructs in the Anatomy of Criticism, relegating it to "part of Canadian life" ("Conclusion," 1965, 822). He then insists on the absence of a specifically Canadian mythology - and the related lack of a national identity - quoting a passage with decidedly colonial overtones: "The art of a Canadian remains ... the art of the country of his forebears and the old world heritage of myth and legend remains his heritage ... though the desk on which he writes be Canadian" (Coulter, Deidre of the Sorrows, vii; Frye, "Conclusion," 1965, 840). Frye proposes that "the imaginative writer ... [find his identity by] withdrawing from what Douglas LePan calls a country without a mythology into the country of mythology" (839-40) - that is, the world of literature itself. But he has already excluded Canadian literature from this world: from his perspective, Canada is a country that, as far as literature is concerned, had not, in 1965, quite "done it" (821). The tensions between Frye's grand systemic structures of literary myth and his positions regarding Canadian literature have been qualified as postmodern in Hutcheon's discussion of his two conclusions of 1965 and 1976. She notes the seemingly contradictory pull between "the modernist frame of reference of Frye's detached and autonomous mythology ... [which can be seen as] a triumph of the totalizing, organizing imagination" ("Frye Receded," 108) and "Frye's contradictory remarks about evaluating the quality of Canadian writing" (109). Hutcheon proposes that if one can get out of the modern paradigm and read for discontinuity, one can appreciate the "pesky postmodern eruptions that break through the modernist order of [Frye's] thought" (in), especially -and significantly - in his writings on Canadian literature. Although she does not go so far as to argue that Frye was a "closet postmodernist" (116), Hutcheon's interesting reading offers a way to accommodate what is often qualified as Frye's puzzling stance toward Canadian literature. It remains probable, however, that the inherent tensions in Frye's elusive and problematic discussions of myth and Canadian literature have contributed to the relative lack of in-depth studies of myth in contemporary literature from English- speaking Canada. To my knowledge, there are no such surveys of myth that are comparable to recent publications of Sirois and Tremblay.

ig Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History NEW APPROACHES TO MYTH Nonetheless, a notable call for innovations in critical methodology to match recent innovations in literature from English-speaking Canada was put forth as early as 1966 by Eli Mandel in Criticism: The SilentSpeaking Words. Mandel called for a type of criticism that could be loosely associated with phenomenology, a criticism that would enable the critic to participate in the work, instead of producing an evaluatory or explanatory treatise. In a sense, Angela Bowering's innovative work on Sheila Watson's The Double Hook: figures Cut in Sacred Ground provides a rare example of this kind of participatory myth criticism. As Shirley Neuman notes, in Figures Cut in Sacred Ground Bowering follows the example of the narrator of The Double Hook, "speaking from within the text as the narrator speaks from within the ground of mythic knowledge and from within the community" (Newman, introduction to Figures, viii). This reading is in sharp contrast to the essays in George Bowering's Sheila Watson and the Double Hook, most of which follow the lead of the Frygian mythopoeic school. A second example of new approaches to that complex field of myth, identity, and literature is found in Dennis Lee's Savage Fields. This study of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers offers a complex and sometimes obscure reflection on the traditional liberal dualism of nature and civilization and proposes different appreciations of the world we live in. According to Lee, "earth" (energy) and "world" (consciousness), if taken as simultaneous entities, transcend the managainst-nature conflict of liberalism's worldview and exist in a dynamic tension that offers new and exciting ways of seeing the universe. It is perhaps significant that writers such as Mandel and Lee, who straddle the fields of creative writing and literary commentary/theory, have discussed new ways of seeing the universe and the potential role of myth in that seeing. Indeed, in the contemporary period, several creative writers have foregrounded their fascination with the changing concept of myth, even if the subject has been largely neglected by both structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Thus, in 1973 the prolific Quebecois writer Victor-Levy Beaulieu, discussing the bouillonnement mythologique in the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Donoso, proposed that Quebecers would get more out of this "grand courant de la litterature sud-americaine ... que des litteratures europeenes et americaines ensemble" ("La Grande Lecon," 15). While the critic Micheline Cambron argues in Une Societe, un recit that the nationalist concerns of most Quebecois literature of

zo New World Myth

the early period of la modernite were relatively homogenous, Jacques Godbout, the writer and cultural commentator, signalled the need as early as the 19605 - to rework Quebec's historical myths of identity. For instance, he has always been particularly fascinated by the mythification process associated with Louis-Joseph Papineau, the always ambiguous hero of the rebellions of 1837-38, and by the postmodern tensions between the Papineau myth and the assumed collectivity that created the myth. Thus, he writes: "J'ai toujours eu, pour les mythes, une admiration inquiete ,.. nous avons done mythif ie Papineau, dont tout le monde voulait la tete. Curieux mythe d'ailleurs, pour un peuple que le clerge desirait soumis, pacifique, et catholique: Papineau etait en Amerique le romantique belliqueux anticlerical, revant d'une republique independante et lai'que (le mot eut-il existe). Papineau parlait bien, pensait juste. Le peuple se 1'appropria ... On se mit a vouloir avoir la tSte a Papineau" ("Novembre 1964," 70; Godbout's emphasis). In chapter 2, we shall see that the necessary ambiguity of the Papineau myth problematizes the traditional historical, religious, and mythological worldview in Quebec and that it celebrates the contemporary complexities and ambiguities of the identitaire issue developed by Sherry Simon and others in Fictions de I'identitaire au Quebec. Godbout's fascination with myth is marked by a paradoxical tension between playfulness and didacticism. It is also tied to the concepts of reinventing reality and with finding a language in which to carry out this constant reinvention. Albertan writer Robert Kroetsch is equally fascinated with myth and its potential to reconfigure the world. Kroetsch's novels are frequently located in that "space between" so prized by postcolonialists, and his work on voice, myth, silence, language, place, and displacement indicate some similarities between his texts and those that demonstrate the use of New World Myth. Rosemary Sullivan notes a progression in Kroetsch's novels, which, while making use of various explorations of myth, move from binary structures to a place beyond - or between? - them. In this way the marked mythic presence and dichotomous structure in The Words of My Roaring are followed by a "self-conscious self-parody in his use of myth" in The Studhorse Man, even if this novel retains its binary structure ("The Fascinating Place Between," 172). Then in Badlands Kroetsch "must not only deconstruct myth; he must go all the way and deconstruct the very binary structures that inform his thinking, in order to seek genuine meditation" (174). Sullivan's use of the imperative "must" here implies a puzzling elusiveness in Kroetsch's work on myth: he must, but does he? Indeed, although Kroetsch's fiction certainly went a long way toward introducing New World techniques such as

21 Post-Modem Myth and Post-European History

magic realism into contemporary English Canadian writing, as Robert Wilson argues in "The Boundary of the Magic and the Real," most of his work on myth differs from New World Myth in two ways. First, he maintains a strong interest in reworking classical myths, whereas New World Myth texts, as I argue below, generally turn away from classical myth. Second, Kroetsch's explorations of myth are at once multifarious and illusive; I sense a questioning of the concept of myth (through his reflections on play, humour, parody, irony, and the uses of different mythological systems) more than an exploration of New World Myth, the perimeters of which are set out below. With regard to myth, Kroetsch's body of work, as he himself has said numerous times, focuses on "de-mythologizing," on "deconstructing the myth," and has to do with "un-inventing the world." One sees this in the section on myth in Labyrinths of Voice, where the exchange of ideas between Kroetsch, Shirley Neuman, and Robert Wilson strongly illustrates the questioning and multifaceted nature of his reflections on myth. Thus, while Kroetsch proclaims his interest in the "generative possibilities of myth" (Kroetsch, "Myth," 103), he also sees myth as "very frightening because it is entrapping ... [and] very powerful"; "one way out," he says, "is to retell it" (96). This perception of myth as a previously existing entity that might be controlled or manipulated through narrative recalls to mind a modernist approach, and 1 would argue that Kroetsch's discussions of myth in both his fictional and his nonfictional writings are valuable not so much for the answers they supply as for the questions they ask. These questions, however, point to the fact that contemporary writers are aware of myth as a potential component of those elements used to reimagine the world in a post-European and postmodern manner. Margaret Laurence is another writer from English-speaking Canada who has reflected on myth, fiction, and the role and responsibilities of the creative writer. For instance, her discussion of the work of "two Third World novelists," Chinua Achebe and herself, addresses the tensions between fiction and history, creativity and didacticism, and the authors' "sense of particular space and particular people" (Laurence, "Ivory Tower or Grassroots?" 17, 22). "Fiction," says Laurence, "for me at least ... becomes a matter of the individual characters moving within a history which includes past, present, and future, and the emergence through these characters of beliefs which cannot be didactic but which in the most profound way are both religious and political" (17). Of course, several studies adopt traditional techniques of myth criticism to address Laurence's novels.12

22 New World Myth

Laurence herself, however, always tied her explorations of myth to history and to a sense of what she has called "the local." In a discussion with Irving Layton in 1970, she says: "People like my grandfather, or like the character of Harvey Lepage in Stud-Horse Man ... these people are our myths. This is our history. And perhaps not consciously, but after awhile consciously, this is what we are trying to set down" (Thomas, "A Conversation," 67). It is in The Diviners, which was published in the year before the decade considered in this study, that one discovers several characteristics that recall aspects of New World Myth. Through her portrayal of the main character of the work, Morag Gunn, a middle-aged creative writer, Laurence instils that familiar tension between written, oral, "universal," and "local," spheres of authority, and between fiction, history, myth, and "Truth." Clara Thomas, among others, has written at length about Laurence's work on myth; she notes "three mythic sets woven into The Diviners: Christie's tales, which give Morag her distant past ... Jules (Skinner) Tonnerre's tales ... and the adult Morag's half-playful, half-serious myth-making of Catharine Parr Traill" ("Chariot of Ossian," 57). Thomas continues: "The passing on of the authentic heritage of their people is a central preoccupation of writers of today, particularly of writers of the post-colonial nations. Laurence of Canada, Walcott of the West Indies, Soyinka and Achebe of Nigeria - these are preeminent among writers who accept a strong social and political, as well as artistic, responsibility in writing out of their own culture and primarily for their own people" (62). While Thomas here appears to posit "culture" and "people" as nonproblematic and easily identifiable entities, Laurence, in correspondence with Thomas, signals her awareness of their complexities: "What I think I share, most of all, with [W.L.] Morton is the sense of my place, the prairies, and of my people (meaning all prairie peoples) within the context of their many and varied histories, and the desire to make all these things come alive in the reader's mind" (Thomas, "Chariot," 63). Like other New World Myth writers, Laurence foregrounds her narrator's self-conscious problematization of the past, as well as that narrator's challenge to the related notion of "Truth." Thus, when Morag provides a story about the life of her deceased parents, whom she looks at in a snapshot, she says: "All this is crazy, of course, and quite untrue. Or maybe true and maybe not. I am remembering myself composing this interpretation, in Christie and Prin's house" (The Diviners, 7). Morag's fascination with language, story, the power of words, and those myths that are local, known, flexible, and important to the community, points to similarities between the novels analyzed in this study and Laurence's work on

23 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

myth. If there is a difference between The Diviners and New World Myth texts - and I am not sure that difference exists - it would be Laurence's apparent underlying belief in a truth of the past. As I note elsewhere in this study, New World Myth texts live with the constantly shifting grounds of certitude in the present age. The Diviners' Morag, however, as Sherill Grace remarks, "is a successful quester in an age that disbelieves in quests, an inheritor, an ancestor, a diviner" ("Portrait of the Artist," 70). Grace applies Ronald Sutherland's tripartite thematic paradigm of the Canadian novel, as outlined in Second Image, to the three main stages in Morag's life. The third of these stages, or themes, Sutherland calls "the search for vital truth," and Grace suggests that, as is the case with Sutherland's typical hero, the recently separated Morag undertakes a "renewed search for meaning" (69). Grace posits that parts of the novel "portray a Morag who has completed her search for meaning. Not only does she know who she is, she knows where she is. She has arrived home and accepted the fact that the past lives within her ... [Morag Gunn] comes to acknowledge the sacredness of her past and her deep loyalty to community and tradition. As long as she cuts herself off from her roots she is incomplete; her final victory is a function of her ability to embrace the totality of her experience" (70). This definitive knowledge with regard to identity and these concepts of completeness and totality are uncharacteristic of New World Myth, which always treats notions such as "the truth of the past" and "the basis of one's identity" with wariness if not with outright scepticism. I wonder, however, if Laurence's appreciation of Morag would be as definitive as the one proposed by Grace. It was Laurence, after all, who said while writing The Diviners: "to try and get down some of the paradoxes of any human individual with everything that has gone to influence their life - their parents, the whole bit about history, religion, the myth of the ancestors, the social environment, their relationships with other people and so on - even to attempt it means attempting the impossible" (Donald Cameron, Conversations with Canadian Novelists, 114). I strongly suspect that Laurence would at least partially share Leonard Cohen's famous formulation of a saint, the one who survives in this our postmodern world: "What is a saint? ... A saint does not dissolve the chaos ... It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski ... Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance" (Beautiful Losers, 101). New World Myth writers, like Cohen's saint riding on the escaped ski, balance precariously on shifting ground as they question the past in the present and carry out their original investigations of myth, place, and identity.

24 New World Myth POSTCOLONIALISM AND

MYTH

IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CANADA AND

QUEBEC

The presence of myth in literature has frequently been tied to the rise of nationalist sentiment. Volker Strunk points out that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Old World countries such as Germany established nationalist myths in their literatures in order to legitimize their existence, Much later, in the postwar mid-twentieth century, what used to be called "developing" - that is to say, nonEuropean - nations sometimes adopted the same attitude, seeing a nationalist literature as an "entry ticket to the family of culturally 'established' nations" (Strunk, "Canadian Literary Criticism," 68). The hunt for myths - uniquely Canadian myths - was on, as is evidenced in Margaret Atwood's comment in 1978: "the North is to Canada as the Outback is to Australia ... It's the place where you go to find something out. It's the place of the unconscious. It's the place of the journey or the quest" (Davidson, "Interview," 204). In Quebec, the symbiotic relationships between literary myth, nationalist literature, and political ideologies have had a long history, as Sutherland points out in his introduction to The New Hero (1977). Writers such as Hubert Aquin and Jacques Godbout show a perhaps more sophisticated awareness of the drive behind the search for myths, but they too signal, if somewhat ironically, a place for nationalist myths that would counteract the "colonial" attitude in Quebecois writing (Aquin, "L'art de la defaite,") and Quebecois society (Godbout, "Novembre 1964"). Inherent in this attitude toward nationalist myth is the basic idea of progress: literatures undergo an organic process of growth toward autonomy, and the presence of nationalist myths in these literatures is taken as a marker of this growth. Implicitly, this development is seen as good. This model of literature derives from the general organic model of the Romantic period, summed up by M.H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, which served the purposes of Old World nationalism. Most thematic studies of the Canadian literatures operate from this basic assumption, from Northrop Frye's first "Conclusion" (1965) to Philip Stratford's more recent comparative work, All the Polarities. This concept of progress toward maturity is Europeanbased, as Strunk, among many others, has pointed out ("Canadian Literary Criticism," 68), and therefore subject to reexamination in postcolonial literatures, which might well operate from somewhat different assumptions. Unfortunately, the basic liberal humanist idea of a slow evolution toward maturity in the Canadian literatures

25 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

remains largely unquestioned, even in many contemporary appraisals of them. For instance, the European Canadianist, Walter Pache, argues that in postmodern English Canadian fiction the "ironic destruction of realistic narrative is more than just an aesthetic exercise: it is an essential step towards an independent national literature" ("Fiction Makes Us Real," 71). Many contemporary novels from English Canada and Quebec, however, combine a challenge to this notion of progress toward autonomy in literature with a selfconscious and frequently ironic interest in the seemingly perennial question of national identity. While the Australian Helen Tiffin argues that postmodernism and poststructuralism belong to the Euro-American sphere of critical activity and are thus the very antithesis of postcolonial theories (Tiffin, "Post-Colonialism," 170), other critics, such as Eva-Marie Kroller, place English Canadian and Quebecois texts at the conjuncture of postmodernism and postcolonialism ("Postmodernism," 53). Stephen Slemon argues that magic realism can be seen as a marker of postcolonial discourse in English Canadian texts ("Magic Realism," 10), while Jacques Godbout, for his part, states that Quebecois literature is "decolonisee": that battle, he writes, was fought in the 19605 ("Le Chevalier errant," 102). Nonetheless, in literary critical circles a debate is currently raging about whether English Canadian and Quebecois literatures can be defined as postcolonial or postmodern or both.13 As I shall illustrate in the discussions that follow, postmodernist challenges to Christian liberal humanism, including the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that humankind is gradually progressing toward an ideal, can coexist with postcolonial questionings of the hegemony of eurocentric world views. However, the tensions involved in applying the terms "postmodern" and "postcolonial" to English Canadian and Quebecois literatures are echoed in the novels themselves. There, a self-conscious postcolonial urge to myth coexists with a postmodern play with myth, and that "congenital art form" in Canada, the search for national identity (New, Among Worlds, 101), forms an ironic backdrop to it all. On the one hand, these novels flaunt their interest in the notion of nation building, in that they self-consciously underline their attempts to revise the traditional, historical definitions of their "nations." On the other hand, these novels undermine the assumptions contained in the liberal humanist ideal of an established national literature with equally established literary and historical myths. Although English-speaking Canada is frequently included in discussions of postcolonial writing, critics have noted that its postcolonial situation is not as clear-cut as that of many other former

26 New World Myth

colonies. In her contribution to the discussion of postmodernism and postcolonialism in the journal Ariel, Hutcheon makes a lengthy but "crucial" digression to address the basic question, Can Canada be considered a postcolonial country? ("Circling," 154-9). The punctuation mark in Albert Memmi's "Les Canadiens frangais sont-ils des colonises?" signals the equally questionable situation of Quebec (Portrait du colonise, 135). Although both Hutcheon and Memmi conclude that English and French Canadians have struggled with issues similar to those faced by colonized peoples everywhere, they nevertheless point to the complex situation that exists in both English Canada and Quebec today. For instance, as I noted in the foreword to this study, the historical colonization of the Amerindian and Inuit peoples by the British and French, along with the problematic relationship between the Canadian and Quebecois governments and the First Nations peoples today, constitutes one component of this complex situation. The second component of the complex postcolonial situation is that Canada does not have one cultural face to present to the world - or to itself. Whether one subscribes to the "two founding nations" theory or to the more contemporary appraisals of both English Canada and Quebec as pluriethnic mosaics, it remains that the very word "Canada" conjures up vastly different images in different contexts. In international critical practice today, Canadian literary studies are divided along linguistic lines. Studies of postcolonial literatures written in English, such as The Empire Writes Back, by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, make a token nod in the direction of Quebec, but, given their different focus, do not explore Quebecois literature itself. Comparative studies of postcolonial literatures written in French, from Quebec and other former colonies, such as Maximilien Laroche's discussion of Quebecois and Haitian literature in Le Miracle et la metamorphose, tend to ignore the literature of English Canada. Furthermore, in Quebec the postcolonial situation is debatable on two fronts: Quebec has not as yet achieved the political independence that motivated the use of the colonise argument in much of its literature of the postwar years, and its first-world status as a mainly white, industrialized "nation" is not comparable to the thirdworld situation of most of France's former colonies. Although E.D. Blodgett argues forcibly that all Canadian literature is comparative literature ("Canadian Literature," 904), the fertile field of cultural complexity and the characteristically Canadian "perception of a mosaic has not generated corresponding theories of literary hybridity to replace the nationalist approach," much to the surprise of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (The Empire Writes Back, 36). Moreover,

27 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

rapid changes in terminology in the 19903 affect discussions of postcolonialism in Canada. As Hutcheon has suggested, "postcolonial" as a generic label "may be misleading with respect to both focus and agenda. The universality implied in any such naming risks homogenizing as well as totalizing and then may mask the complexity of the colonial and postcolonial experiences of diverse individuals and societies in various times and places" ("Colonialism," 10). The multifarious uses and implications of the term "postcolonial" are raised by Stephen Slemon, who first encountered the term "as the name for a category of 'literary' activity which sprang from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called 'Commonwealth' literary studies" ("The Scramble for Post-colonialism," 45). Although this statement implies that Commonwealth studies are a thing of the past, other postcolonialists - such as Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge in their brilliant critique of The Empire Writes Back) argue that it is necessary to speak in terms of "many postcolonialisms," because an "undifferentiated concept of posteolonialism overlooks ... the very radical differences ... and the unbridgeable chasms that existed between White and non-White colonies" (Mishra and Hodge, "Post(-)colonialism?" 284-5). In English-speaking Canada and Quebec, the reasons for the continued and apparently problematic presence of a nationalist thematic in their literatures lie in their particular postcolonial situations. In her study of postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Tempest, Diana Brydon proposes that English Canadians tend to see themselves in Miranda, the "dutiful daughter of the empire" ("Re-writing The Tempest," 77). Prospero's values, she notes, "are internalized by Miranda but redefined through her interaction with Caliban" (86). English Canadian rewritings of The Tempest are clearly different from those of other former colonies. They show how "Canadians have internalized the process of their colonization: they are themselves Prospero and what he has colonized is a vital part of themselves." Brydon suggests that for this reason English Canadian texts find it harder to reject outright the imperial/colonial legacy, and she insists on the necessity to investigate "the special nature of the Canadian imagination" (87). Of course, two of the three "English Canadian" authors discussed in this study have a double linguistic and cultural heritage: Joy Kogawa foregrounds her Japanese antecedents, while Rudy Wiebe's understanding of marginalization is undoubtedly influenced by his own German Mennonite background. Their novels, nonetheless, along with George Bowering's work, strongly thematize the reshaping of that elusive Canadian imagination through their retellings of Canadian history.

28 New World Myth

Max Dorsinville's concern also lies with a postcolonial attitude to the political imagination, but in Quebec. He notes that it was more difficult for French Canadians than for postcolonial nations of the Black diaspora to decolonize their imaginations, given their closer cultural and racial ties to their imperial centre, France. For a long time, the conservative urge to nationalism in French Canada relied on an imaginative association with France, the now infamous merepatrie. Only when the French Canadian writer "de-emphasizes his French origins [can he discover] ... a novel sense of identity" (Caliban, 206) and become a Quebecois. Gilles Therien underlines the need for a postcolonial attitude as he argues for a radical realignment of Quebec's literary production: "[il faudrait] parler selon 1'axe nordsud, prendre conscience de la totalite de 1'Amerique, Nouveau Monde d'un pole a 1'autre, terre de conquete et de metissage ou 1'Europe est venue organiser horizontalement un territoire vertical ("La Litterature quebecoise," 14). This north-south axis in literature is beginning to be explored in works such as Earl Fitz's Rediscovering the New World and David Jordan's New World Regionalism. Cultural hybridity is equally discernible in the narrators of the three Quebecois texts examined here, and yet they too remain concerned with imaginative retellings - and deconstructions - of Quebecois history. Teleological terms such as "nation" are frequently suspect in postcolonial practices. Since the years 1975-85, of course, the very concept of nationalism has undergone a radical rethinking, as Michael Ignatieff illustrates in Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Much earlier, Albert Memmi asked, "comment peut-on encore parler sans rire de nations?" (Portrait du colonise, 142). The authors of The Empire Writes Back also adopt a critical tone, deploring the nationalist focus of much contemporary Canadian literature (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 36). In fact, most international, postcolonial Englishlanguage studies point to the continuing preoccupation with sociopolitical identity in English Canadian literature. Beryl Langer, for example, argues that "Whereas the question 'What is an Australian?' is readily answered, however inaccurately ... the 'typical Canadian' is less easily defined. Canadians are 'not American' and they're 'not British/ but the question of what they are ... is [uncertain]." She goes on to argue, however, that this political ambivalence is beneficial, at least to women's writing, since the confusion about national identity in Canada leaves open possibilities for women's entry into culture that represent "a considerable advance on the Australian situation" ("Women and Literary Production," 147). Preoccupation with the flexible-identity issue opens up similar possibilities for postEuropean myth in contemporary English Canadian literature.

29 Fost-Modern Myth and Post-European History

The ambivalence toward political identity in many contemporary English Canadian fictions has its origins in the ambiguous relationship that a settler colony has with the imperial centre: the battle lines are not clear-cut. A settler colony in D.E.S. Maxwell's comparative model in "Landscape and Theme" is a country, such as Australia or English Canada, where the indigenous population was overwhelmed by European colonists. Writers from settler colonies eventually came "to question the appropriateness of imported language to place" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 25). An invaded colony, such as India or Nigeria, is one where indigenous peoples were not completely overwhelmed but whose "ancient and sophisticated responses [to their environment were] marginalized by the worldview which was implicated in the acquisition of English." As with the literature of many settler colonies, it is difficult to eradicate internalized historico-political myths in English Canadian literature. Indeed, given the multitiered postcolonial situations in what is now called Canada, the notion of the imperial centre is itself a constantly shifting concept. This accounts for the underlying interest in the national identity question, even in postcolonial and postmodern texts, and points to the necessity of retaining this notion in any investigation of the contemporary literary production of English Canada. Rewriting political history is an essential component of English Canadian postmodern literature, even if, internationally, postmodernism is frequently seen as politically ambivalent (Hutcheon, "Circling," 150). The postcolonial thrust in this postmodern literature involves a rewriting of "the myths that write us"; perhaps more than other former colonies, Canadians feel the need to "decolonize the mind" (Brydon, "The Myths that Write Us," i). English Canadian texts engage various colonial/imperial heritages in their rewriting of history and in their efforts to reshape the imagination through their work on myth. In the discussions that follow, then, the specific focus will be on the sociopolitical dimension of the novels, their self-conscious explorations and exploitations of the notion of national identity, the active, creative invention of the past(s), as opposed to the reactive, passive acceptance of the Old World systems, and lastly and most importantly, the role of myth in these fictions. The present situation of Quebec is not one of political autonomy. Various sociologists, politicians, historians, poets, and novelists have argued that Quebec was - and remains - a political, cultural, and linguistic colony. For francophone Quebecois, the political colonizers are generally seen as the British (the Conquest of 1760; the Rebellions

3O New World Myth

of 1837-38) and then the English Canadians (the conscription crisis of World War II). France has come to be seen as a patronizing merepatrie, especially in the cultural domain, and the more recent American influence on Quebecois society is also signalled in many contemporary Quebecois texts. Hubert Aquin's Prochain Episode is perhaps the most characteristic of the literary works published before 1975 that proposed that Quebec was colonise. But major changes have taken place in the worldview of the Quebecois collectivity since 1975. These ongoing changes are indicative, I would suggest, of a postcolonial reevaluation of the Quebecois situation in the world. Quebec certainly sees itself as a distinct society that has been concerned with the need to establish its cultural and economic independence from dominating powers. Sociopolitical innovations during the second half of the twentieth century have created an infrastructure in Quebec that would enable it to govern itself. Thus, Quebec has its own civil service, its own police force, its own "diplomatic" offices, and, perhaps regrettably for its citizens, its own income tax. English Canada - often cryptically referred to as "Ottawa" or le federal - is perceived as "other," and is frequently peripheral to the Quebecois worldview. One simple illustration of the strong sense of autonomy I am trying to describe is found in daily news broadcasts, which use au niveau national to mean "within the boundaries of Quebec." This sense of nation, I would suggest, was not dealt a mortal blow by the "No" votes in the referendums on sovereignty-association in 1980 and 1995, for several reasons, among them the probability, as I argue here, that the sense of nation has become - and continues to be - an integral part of I'imaginaire quebecois. Nevertheless, contemporary Quebecois postmodern texts also struggle with dominant historico-political myths. The ambiguity in English Canadian postmodernism toward the imperialist influence over the historico-political imagination is also found in much contemporary Quebecois literature, even if this ambiguity is largely ignored in comparative Canadian or English-language postcolonial studies, where it is felt that the question of national identity in Quebec has long been resolved (Langer, "Women and Literary Production," 147). The social upheaval of the Quiet Revolution did bring about welcome social, cultural, and literary reforms. It also prepared the field, however, for what Dorsinville calls novels of ambiguity, which reflect "the consciousness of the complexity of life the French Canadian never had access to when either the cult of Messianism or le pays meant a belief in simple creeds and answers, a reduction of life to religious or secular dogma" (Caliban, 181).

31 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

Dorsinville's evaluation of contemporary Quebecois novels is appropriate here: these works must come to terms with the "heterogeneity of life" and somehow address the postmodern fragmentation of all aspects of traditional society. Quebec's former hesitation to modernize, its traditional linkage of la modernite to Mai (as observable in a nonreligious/ free-thinking France or a materialist and capitalist America) prompts Marcel Fournier to propose, tongue in cheek, that "pour la petite collectivite francophone d'Amerique, le handicap de son acces tardif a la modernite, qui apparalt deja ancienne, pourrait tres bien se reveler un avantage et lui permettre de devenir postmoderne avant toutes les autres" (L'Entree dans la modernite, 7). This observation, of course, is echoed in Robert Kroetsch's cryptic pronouncement that "Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern" ("A Canadian Issue," i). The postcolonial urge to get out from under worn-out, protectionist historico-political myths is the motivating force behind the postmodern work on myth in all the novels discussed in this study. Pierre Hebert proposes that the Quebecois novel has evolved through three distinct colonial periods ("Un probleme de semiotique diachronique," 218). Basing his frame of argument on Georges Gusdorf's work on myth, Mythe et metaphysique, Hebert proposes a loose chronology of the Quebecois novel: the mythic period (1837-1940), the rational period (1940-1960), and the historical period, which he subdivides into two stages: personal history (1960-75) and collective history (since 1975). Hebert posits an evolution in the narrative voice that corresponds to these three periods; he discerns a gradual progression from nous through il to je. Thus, in the mythic period of the nous, the francophone collectivity experiences a stage of withdrawal that began after the Conquest and that is especially evident in novels published after the Rebellions of 1837-38. In the rational period, the voice of narration evolves from il (or elk) to je, as the colonized individual begins to distance himself/herself from his/her colonial status. In the stage of personal history, "le je maintenant personnalise tente de se donner une histoire" (226). Hebert posits, but does not develop, "I'hypothese d'un deuxieme stade de 1'age historique ou le projet d'ecriture se deplace de la personne a la societe. Cette nouvelle (?) serie romanesque nous servira des chroniques, des romans historiques ... ou la collectivite essaie maintenant de se donner un portrait d'elle-meme, un nouveau 'nous,' mais compose, cette fois, de 'je' conscients d'eux-memes. Apres 1'independance de la personne peut se faire 1'independance de la communaute" (236). This last stage is obviously of relevance here. The historiographic Quebecois novels examined in this study - all published during Hebert's time frame

32

New World Myth

for collective history - simultaneously reflect and help constitute a post-European worldview. A postmodern sense of fragmentation is discernible in the reworkings of myth and history in these three texts. Hebert, writing in 1982, even seems to have anticipated the 19903 preoccupation with I'ecriture migrante, which discusses works where, indeed, the nous is composed of multiple jes conscious of themselves.14 Two influential studies in postcolonialism have suggested that Dorsinville's expression "post-European" may prove to be more useful than postcolonial, since its political and theoretical implications have much to offer.15 This suggestion is especially applicable with regard to Quebec's present political situation, and I have chosen to employ the term in much of my discussion. My use of the term "postcolonial" refers implicitly to the substantial and ever-increasing body of research and scholarship in this field, while my use of "postEuropean" generally implies a sense of opposition - of being "anti" European models and myths. In the six novels discussed here, play with myth constitutes a self-conscious effort to decolonize the mind and to undercut the influence of inherited, European-inspired myths: post-European New World Myths are the result of these efforts. HISTORIOGRAPHIC FICTION AND NEW WORLD MYTH

In this study, the notion of worldview is seen primarily in the sociohistorical context of the New World. As Ronald Hatch has noted, in Canada, as in other New World countries, "responses to history are often formulated at least in part on the experience implicit in being a new-world country ... [By] the 19605, it was becoming apparent to historical novelists that different narrative techniques were required to reorient the individual to history. Much of the impetus for a new sense of narrative derives from non-European novelists, in particular the so-called 'magic realists,' such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes" ("Narrative Development," 79-81). One narrative technique that provides a fresh perspective on history in many postmodern English Canadian and Quebecois novels is their deliberately self-conscious play with fiction, history, and myth. The overtly political character of imaginative expression found in these novels is, of course, also discernible in many nationbuilding novels of the late nineteenth century in European nations. While the narratorial techniques analyzed here are not entirely new, in many ways the expectations and the audience are. The rewriting of European-inspired history is a central concern of many postcolonial

33 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

literatures; the goal is to revise, reappropriate, or reinterpret history in order to allow "those re-orderings of consciousness that 'history' has rendered silent or invisible [to] be recognized as shaping forces in a culture's tradition" (Slemon, "Post-Colonial Allegory," 159). Although the six novels discussed here do not set out to impose a new, fixed order on history, they do challenge the old Europeaninspired order of history by paradoxically producing works that thematize the reclaiming of the past. Linda Hutcheon applies the term "historiographic metafiction" to novels that self-consciously thematize the historiographical process: by this she means "those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages ... Historiographic metafiction incorporates ... three ... domains [fiction, history, and theory]: its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiograp/zzc metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past ... [H]istoriographic metafiction ... always works within conventions in order to subvert them. It is not just metafictional, nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the nonfictional novel" (Poetics of Postmodernism, 5). The six novels discussed here are historiographic metafictions; they flaunt the tensions produced by their postmodern questionings of history and traditional myths and by their contradictory urge to "establish" new myths of the past. However, as both theorists and novelists have illustrated, all the "foundations" upon which an emerging literature could conceivably be built have been problematized by the ontological and epistemological questionings of the postmodern age. Hence I occasionally use ironic quotation marks around terms such as "centre," "establish," and "foundation." "Myth," of course, is often closely linked to these concepts. Indeed, myth has traditionally been regarded as one of the important determining factors of any given people's worldview. Eric Gould's attitude constitutes a traditionally accepted given of myth criticism: "What we consider essential about myth seems to me to be no more or less than its exemplary function of intending-to- interpret, whether its object is social compromise, the supernatural, questions covering the self and its place in the world, or those issues we think of as ultimate, unanswerable, and metaphysical" (Mythical Intentions, 34). A similar traditional definition of myth is found in the work of Mircea Eliade: "Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the 'beginnings'" (Myth and Reality, 5). The foremost function of myth, proposes Eliade, "is to reveal the exemplary models for all human rites

34 New World Myth

and all significant human activities" (8). Thus, in his schema myth serves to establish, reinforce, and legitimize the validity of human beings' existence - to answer, as Gould notes, "questions concerning the self and its place in the world" (Mythical Intentions, 34). Mikhail Bakhtin, for his part, claims that the defining factor of mythological thought is the "absolute bonding of ideological meaning to language," suggesting a worldview where experiences are expressed and categorized in language in a way that greatly restricts any challenges or changes (Dialogic Imagination, 369). One function of traditional myth, then, is to attempt to make unified sense of the world. In 1979, the Conseil des universites of the Government of Quebec invited Jean-Frangois Lyotard to write a report on knowledge and learning in the contemporary era. In that report, translated as The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard states, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv). Lyotard gives as an example of a metanarrative the "Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace" (xxiii-xxiv) and in which the "possible unanimity between rational minds" (xxiii) is accepted as what I would call a given. Myth, as characterized above by Gould, would obviously constitute one of these metanarratives. This does not mean, however, that all forms of myth are metanarratives. The present study constitutes an admittedly tentative effort to examine a form of myth found in post-European fictions. Its particular focus is on how the selected fictional works manipulate myth, a traditionally accepted metanarrative of the Old World, in their formulations of what I have chosen to call, following Margery Fee, "New World Myth" ("Making New World Myth," 8). When a developing form defines itself against the form from which it derives, it can easily generate tension. This is, in fact, the predominant effect created by the narrators of the New World Myth novels analyzed here. Tension is first generated by the obvious conflict between historical reality and novelistic fiction, which draws readers into the debate: "did it really happen this way?" Second, the narrators' drive to affirm their version of the past ("it happened this way") conflicts with their and our awareness of a fundamental epistemological uncertainty about ever really knowing the past. Third, a refusal of certain givens - such as history as taught by the colonizing powers, or God, or religion - conflicts with the need to use the givens in order to illustrate and then problematize their power over the imagination. Fourth, the narrators' overt awareness of the narrative process ("listen, I am telling you this story") conflicts with their self-consciousness about its limitations and the readers' awareness of

35 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

the techniques being used in the text. Fifth, the very term "New World Myth" could be said to generate tension. Articulating itself against that out of which it originates, New World Myth introduces not only a notion of flexibility but also a social, political, historical, and temporal component into the traditional concept of myth as something immutable, eternal, and, especially, transhistorical. The term itself is oxymoronic; it deliberately introduces a historical dimension into traditional notions of mythic universality. New World Myth in these novels is an imaginative attempt to explore world views more suited to the world in which we live. This New World Myth is anchored in historiography; it is highly political; it is concerned with both epistemological uncertainty and the need to know, and is intent on imaginatively reclaiming the past while flaunting its awareness of the processes involved in this act. The six novels studied in detail here problematize issues traditionally accepted as givens - issues such as knowledge, history, certitude, truth, or God. Although it could be argued that debate on such issues has always constituted the subject matter of novels everywhere, the positivistic, relatively unquestioning acceptance of their unproblematic nature in French and English Canadian writing is frequently remarked upon in literary overviews and studies in cultural history, and has only begun to be challenged in contemporary studies such as Robert Lecker's Canadian Canons or Pierre Nepveu's Ecologie du reel. New World Myth novels are in the process of selfconsciously (and, usually, ironically) "developing" their respective mythologies. They have progressed beyond the survival attitude that has been so heavily promoted and so closely studied by cultural historians. In contemporary Canadian literature, Frye's frequently cited provisional concept of the garrison mentality is replaced by a self-conscious embracing of ideas that are not marked predominantly by fear, defensiveness, and the need for survival. The six novels examined here are exploratory works: in turning to the study of the past, they seek to present themselves as inevitably partial testimonials to a vibrant historico-political identity that recognizes, affirms, and celebrates the very fragility of its nature. Myth, in these postmodern works, serves as a cognitive, imaginative tool in the novelistic exploration of a new post-European worldview, H I S T O R Y A N D N E W WORLD M Y T H

In the mid-twentieth century, there seems to have been a general acceptance of what I have called "givens" in the work of English and

36 New World Myth

French Canadian writers - at least insofar as few radical challenges to these givens can be found in the texts of the time. In Europe, however, at least one of these issues was often problematized. History was perceived as a threatening element in many European novels of the early and mid-twentieth century. The frequently cited utterance of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus about history being a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken (Ulysses, 34) is an apt illustration of the general feeling of malaise about history in the modernist period, especially after the devastation of the First World War. Hayden White has discussed the hostility of twentieth-century mainstream literature toward the historical consciousness. Stating that the "modern writer's hostility towards history is evidenced most clearly in the practice of using the historian to represent the extreme example of repressed sensibility in the novel and theatre," he illustrates this point with examples taken from the works of authors such as Andre Gide, Aldous Huxley, Andre Malraux, Thomas Mann, Wyndham Lewis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Kingsley Amis and Edward Albee (Tropics of Discourse, 31). After exploring the notion that there is "a revolt against history in modern [fictional] writing" (39), White proposes that both science and art have "discovered the essentially provisional character of the metaphorical constructions which they use to comprehend a dynamic universe" (50). Therefore, coherent notions of continuous history might well also be seen as provisional. White ends this chapter by suggesting the need for a "history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot" (50). Arthur Kroker and David Cook suggest in The Postmodern Scene that the present period constitutes a good example of this chaos: "Ours is a fin-de-millenium consciousness which, existing at the end of history in the twilight time of ultramodernism (of technology) and hyper-primitivism (of public moods), uncovers a great arc of disintegration and decay" (8). Although I do not share Kroker and Cook's pessimistic appraisal of the postmodern age, White's description of our lot as one of discontinuity and disruption nevertheless forms the background to this study. While turning toward historiography by reexamining and retelling events of the English Canadian and Quebecois historico-political past(s), the novels examined here are in fact exploring worldviews that correspond to postmodern changes in the contemporary cultures of English Canada and Quebec. Although the term "modernism" is sometimes associated with English Canadian poetry, as in Brian Trehearne's Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, its applicability to Canadian prose fiction is

37 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

highly debatable. Dennis Duffy, for instance, argues that there is only one "full-blown instance of literary modernism" to be found in the Canadian corpus - O'Hagan's Tay John - and that this work is a presager of postmodernism ("Losing the Line," 175-6), while Stephen Scobie argues that Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers may be read as a highly organized book: "Cohen is trying to become a postmodernist, one might say, but he is going about it in a very modernist manner" ("End(s) of Modernism," 66). Fiction writers of what is loosely and infrequently termed the "modernist period" in English Canada are generally characterized as realist writers; they do not appear to have adopted the wary attitude to history displayed by their European counterparts. Referring to the work of Grove, Callaghan, MacLennan, Richler, and Laurence, Larry McDonald notes that "Canadian modernism was shaped in the '303; the majority of our writers affiliated themselves with some form of socialism and the result was a modernism whose aesthetic placed the work of art squarely in the world of social and historical determinants" ("Post modernism," 30). The same argument might be made for French Canadian writers of the same period - writers such as Roy, Lemelin, Yves Theriault, and the early Anne Hebert. However, there are formal and ideological differences between the retellings of history in the English and French Canadian fictions of the mid-twentieth century and the postmodern works analyzed in this study. Compared to the works of the authors cited by McDonald, the texts analyzed here make more blatant use, in their challenges to history and to historiography, of the techniques that have come to be considered the markers of postmodernism in fiction: autoreferentiality, intertextuality, playful self-reflexivity, parody, irony, and multiple, often contradictory, retellings of the same event. They also thematize many concerns of postcolonial literatures: the centre/margin debate; place and displacement; language, speech, and silence; written versus oral history; and multiple challenges to the hegemony of the Christian liberal-humanist worldview. A further distinction is the attitude toward myth in these contemporary works. While the European modernists escaped from history into myth, the narrators of the works discussed here turn toward history in their exploration of a different sort of myth. Like Gerard Bessette's apprentice-historian Guito in Les Anthropoides, the New World narrator strives to "imager en paroles" (17) in an effort to discover the perimeters of a post-European, post-colonial, and postmodern (in the sense of literary period) worldview. Such a discovery, however, as Paul Simon's song says, keeps "slip-slidin' away." This is due to the collision, in a manner of speaking, between the

38 New World Myth

narrators' didactic interest in retelling the past and their awareness of the constantly shifting grounds of certitude in the present age. Rudy Wiebe, for instance, is the speaker in the two passages that follow. The first underlines his strong sense of didactic/historical mission: "For in forcing me to discover the past of my place on my own as an adult, my public school inadvertently roused an anger in me ... All people have history. The stories we tell of our past are by no means merely words: they are meaning and life to us as people, as a particular people; the stories are there, and if we do not know of them, we are simply, like animals, memory ignorant, and the less are we people" ("Big Bear," 134). The second passage reveals his suspicion of any certitude, even in a retelling of historical facts: "Well, you need the facts so you can make something out of them. To discover facts or to discover details of geography are things that are done ... But, then, when it's done, it's finished with. The act is in the past. The fact is always in the past, but a fiction is what you make of it. And you have to have a certain amount of facts to make a fiction out of them. Something that will last" (Mandel and Wiebe, "Where the Voice Comes From," 152). Eli Mandel has noted the lack of a strong sense of history in Canada: "Of the French in Canada, we know Lord Durham said, 'They have no history.' Of the English in Canada, English parliamentarians might be tempted to say, They know no history.' And of both, the perennial question remains (as Northrop Frye puts it) not: who are they? but: where are they? The etymology of the name 'Canada' is, in one version, Portuguese, 'Ca nada' - translating crudely as There is no one here' or 'Nothing here at all'" (Family Romance, 29-30). One could easily argue that the explosion, in the last decade or so, of historical novels, documentary fictions, and fictional biographies and autobiographies manifests a desire on the part of many creative writers to respond to - and to self-consciously problematize - both the question of 'who' and the question of 'where' in the passage just quoted. The six historiographic texts studied here have been selected precisely because they allow for discussions of specific aspects of the role of myth in the creative rewriting of the history of that "who" and that "where." I chose them because I liked them, but also because I felt they would provide an opportunity to illustrate various workings of New World Myth. Many other novels would have served the purpose, but I wanted to look closely at the work on myth in a selected - and therefore necessarily limited - number of novels of that period. These novels form part of a much larger corpus whose thematic focus is to recreate fictionally events of the English Canadian

39 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

and Quebecois historico-political pasts. Some works of that larger corpus are straightforward historical novels; they present an unproblematic fictional situation in which the "novelist researches his [or her] chosen period thoroughly and strives for verisimilitude" (Cuddon, "Historical Novel/' 309). However, other contemporary texts actively engage history in order to problematize the past. Instead of turning away from historical events, by creating, for example, purely imaginary events and characters in what is commonly called a "fictional situation," these works rewrite history in a fictional mode that has much to do with challenging any monolithic sense of how we acquire knowledge of the past in the postmodern age.16 The issue of the American influence on - many would say "colonization of" - English Canadian and Quebecois cultures is not a central concern of this study. This is because the six texts studied here, while aware of this American influence, mainly thematize the retelling of the conflicts of more remote history, or else their concern lies with the internal political situation of Quebec or Canada or both. As Hutcheon points out in a discussion of English Canadian art and literature, historical colonization concerns the British - or, more broadly, the European - factor, whereas present day "colonization" is carried out largely through the American media (Politics of Representation, 12). In the case of Quebec, of course, there is at least a double historical colonization, with the French preceding the British factor. The six novels discussed here were published in the years 197585. On the political level, this period was one of extreme turmoil. The election of the Parti Quebecois in 1976 was followed by the referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980, and the subsequent defeat of the referendum proposal demanded a political adjustment of major proportions in Quebec. English Canada was also politically perturbed, as events in Quebec and Ottawa, culminating in the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982, provoked intense debate about the historical reasons underlying the political uncertainties of the period. The six novels are united by the fact that the reflections on the past found in their nontraditional narratives contain an awareness of the political present. In some of the novels, such as Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau, that political present is frequently signalled; in others, such as Kogawa's Obasan, its muted presence is found in occasional references to contemporary issues that were not necessarily perceived as problematic in the past. These metafictional novels flaunt their focus on politics and their explorations of elements such as fantasy, myth, and play as cognitive tools in the retelling of past events. Patricia Waugh has noted how

4O New World Myth

self-reflexive fictions, while making readers aware of their expectations, propose a partial answer to the "need to know" through an investigation of what she, somewhat vaguely, calls "the mythic": "As novel readers, we look to fiction to offer us cognitive functions, to locate us within everyday as well as within philosophical paradigms, to explain the historical world as well as offer some formal comfort and certainty. [Robert] Scholes argues that the empirical has lost all validity and that a collusion between the philosophic and the mythic in the form of 'ethically controlled fantasy' is the only authentic mode for fiction [Fabulators, 11]. However, rnetafiction offers the recognition, not that the everyday has ceased to matter, but that its formulation through social and cultural codes brings it closer to the philosophical and mythic than was once assumed" (Metafiction, 16). Play with traditional mythic elements is evident in postmodern English Canadian and Quebecois texts. Laurent Mailhot, discussing the work of Quebecois writers such as Louis Caron, Victor-Levy Beaulieu, Jacques Poulin, Gerard Bessette, and Michel Tremblay, in an article significantly entitled "Romans de la parole (et du mythe)," discerns two major categories in contemporary Quebecois writing. In contrast to the experimental, theoretical texts of I'ecriture by novelists such as Nicole Brossard and Francois Heberr, there exists a sophisticated, but undefined, mythic fiction "qu'il faut situer quelque part entre 1'oral et 1'ecrit, entre la tradition et la modernite, entre 1'epopee et la critique (1'autocritique)" (84). While the novels of I'ecriture flaunt their European intertextuality, Mailhot notes that novels of the second category are definitely grounded in the North American context. He seems to find it easier to define novels of I'ecriture than novels "de la parole (et du mythe)." He foregrounds the exploratory nature of the latter: their fictions are situated "somewhere between" various poles, and although they give the appearance of being popular or folkloric, they also contain a sophisticated rhetoric that can constitute an opposition - or even a reaction - to the formal, intellectual novels of I'ecriture. Mailhot notes a common trend in these contemporary texts: their exploration of the past and of their own nature incorporates a study of myth. While he does not offer a precise definition of myth, he does propose that these North American fictions look to various sources for their inspiration, sources which include selfconscious usage of biblical writings and techniques from what has been called the archaic or precontact "primitive" period: "Parole, parabole, parolade, parade: le roman/recit quebecois cherche son commencement, son histoire, son sens ... Hubert Aquin se mesurait a Joyce, Jacques Perron se mesure a Moliere, a Lewis Carroll, a

41 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

1'eloquence indienne ... [L]a demesure de la parole, du mythe, passe les bornes et deplace les frontieres. Ou situer telles nouvelles fantastiques? ... La guerre se fait a 1'interieur meme de 1'univers fictionnel [des textes etudies dans cet essai]" (86). Mailhot is not alone in positing that the play with myth in many contemporary Quebecois fictions is somehow related to a distinction between the Old World (Europe) and the New World. Eva-Marie Kroller, discussing the attractiveness of Herman Melville's work for George Dowering and Victor-Levy Beaulieu, states that Melville's work "interjects itself between the Canadian authors and their reaction to European predominance ... Melville [may be perceived] as part of a Utopian concept of America, the promise of a mythic new space in which European notions of man-made order are no longer applicable" (Kroller, "Postmodernism," 54). In the contemporary texts examined here, there is a sophisticated awareness of a "mythic setting" - the New World - and a wish to distinguish the English Canadian/Quebecois territories of the imagination from those of the "old" colonizing nations, England and France. These novels obviously do not uphold the European-inspired myth of the New World as a natural, uncontaminated paradise, where humankind can begin anew. As the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott points out, "the apples of [the] second Eden have the tartness of experience" ("Muse of History," 115). These novels investigate, through their reworkings of myth, the possibilities of a new, but not naive, historico-political vision of the New World. CLASSICAL AND BIBLICAL MYTH

The obvious question is, what is to be called myth in the context of English Canadian and Quebecois historiographic metafiction? In its most general formulation, a myth is a story of special significance. This criterion would obviously include such common notions as classical myth, defined as "of, having to do with, or designating ancient Greek and Rome, especially with respect to their art and literature" (Gage Canadian Dictionary, s.v. "classical"). James Joyce, for instance, makes use, via the text of the Odyssey, of the story of Ulysses in Ulysses, his modern novel about Ireland. The novels studied here do not make extended and coherent use of classical myths. In many New World Myth novels, there is a deliberate attempt to turn away from the European worldview, so strongly influenced by the idea of a classical education, and to use what is known and at hand in the New World as a source for New World Myth. Thus, the

42 New World Myth

narrator of Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska's La Maison Trestler deliberately refuses an Old World Myth to concentrate on the historicopolitical happenings of the New World. Asked by a "real" historian if she possesses letters written by Iphigenie, a significantly named member of the Trestler family (whose existence she is fictionally recreating), the narrator thematizes in the following passage her awareness of the narrative and of historiography, her preoccupation with "les gens d'ici," and her refusal of Antiquity and its myths: "Je panique en entendant parler [des lettres d'Iphigenie] ... Mon stylo se deplace de fantasme en fantasme, aide de quelques documents et d'une imagination demente ... Je renonce a Iphigenie ... [qui] me conduirait chez les Grecs, chez Agamemnon ... Or, je suis deja debordee par 1'Amerique, le Canada a mare usque ad mare [sic], la guerre de Sept ans ... Je ne saurais me mettre 1'Antiquite sur les bras sans perir. Mon cheval de Troie ne peut galoper aussi loin" (191-2). This is not to say that all English Canadian and Quebecois novels of this period put classical myths aside. Louky Bersianik's Le Pique-nique sur I'Acropole, as Patricia Smart has noted, is "a denunciation and reversal of the Greek myths inherent in Western psychology" ("Culture," 10); and Robert Kroetsch also parodies classical myths in his retelling of stories of the Canadian prairies. Nonetheless, many contemporary historiographic novelists in English-Canada and Quebec follow Ouellette-Michalska's lead and overtly foreground their rejection of classical myth as a paradigm for myth. Rather than turning to the classical tradition, New World Myth turns in part to the biblical tradition, that is, to the well-known religious stories implanted in the New World that have gradually taken on a mythic life of their own. Viewed from a mythic perspective, the four books of the New Testament tell stories of special significance about a god - Jesus Christ. Among biblical scholars there exists an ongoing argument about the applicability of the term "myth" to the Bible, given its special status in the Western Christian worldview, and there is frequently a resistance to the reduction of the sacred Scriptures to the mere level of myth. Thus, Lee W. Gibbs believes in the teleological power of Jewish and Christian myths, which "possess the inherent power to convert the time process from meaningless repetition and absurdity into a cosmic drama in which men may find meaning, purpose, and value through their own existential involvement and participation" ("Myth and the Mystery," 19). His colleague, W. Taylor Stevenson, notes that the mythological stories of Greece and Rome "[became] trivialized and [were] made a matter of literature in the Hellenistic period" ("Myth and the Crisis," 5). Speaking as a Christian, Stevenson argues against a similar fate for

43 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

biblical myth. He too believes in the totalizing power of myth, particularly biblical myth: "The fundamental function of myth ... is one of cosmicization; of giving meaning and shape to the world; of stating what is really real, self-founded, true, and good ... Because the myth speaks authoritatively of the real and the true, it perforce speaks of the sacred" (5). In Catholic Quebec, and perhaps to a lesser extent in Englishspeaking Canada, it has been considered sacrilegious to term anything in the Bible a myth; the Bible was to be taken literally as the word of God. This resistance is clearly due in part to one connotation of the term myth as "untruth" (Frye, Anatomy, 75). More to the point, myth criticism of the Bible has frequently been viewed as a method of lessening its power to shape and maintain the Christian worldview. Myths, however, sometimes "take on a new lease of literary life once their connection with belief and cult disappears, as Classical mythology did in Christian Europe" (Frye, "Literature and Myth," 33). Although Frye implies that a myth stays the same while the external events surrounding it change, I would propose that postmodern novels assume control over the myth-making process and that a New World Myth is not as immutable as Frye suggests myths should be. Through their manipulations of biblical myth, the historiographic fictions examined here create a certain distancing from the traditional unquestioning acceptance of Christian doctrines. Some narrators tend to denounce vehemently and to attempt to destroy the traditional hold of the Christian belief system over the imagination; others use biblical myths to confer importance on the characters and events they recreate. All the narrators, however, maintain a critical distance; they operate within the Christian belief system to further their own myth-making, but they are aware of it and posit it as a constructed system. They all use and abuse biblical myths - in particular, the Christ story - in coming to grips with the strong biblical influence on our literatures. Both J.J. White (Mythology, 73-4) and Northrop Frye (Anatomy, 101) have noted a decline in scholarly knowledge about classical myth; Frye posits the same decline with regard to biblical stories (Anatomy, 14). Although there may well have been a decline in serious scholarly knowledge, I would suggest that a popular awareness of biblical stories still constitutes an integral part of those contemporary English Canadian and Quebecois worldviews that have been formed by the Christian religious system. Religious practice, of course, may have declined greatly, but the stories, perhaps subconsciously, can still affect world views. The extremely deep vein of what could be called religious writing, in both Quebecois and English Canadian

44 Now World Myth

fiction, has been noted by cultural commentators from Northrop Frye ("Conclusion," 1976, 328) to George Bowering ("Modernism," 5). Although the novels discussed here challenge what they consider to be an untoward predominance of the biblical element in the traditional Western worldview by subverting the sacred in biblical writings, they all use biblical myth in their narrative exploration and development of New World Myth. One distinction made above is worth stressing: the extremely strong monopoly held by the Catholic belief system over imaginative thought in the traditional Quebecois worldview, especially prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 19605. This monopoly was due to several factors, almost all of which no longer form a large part of everyday life in Quebec, but which at one time strongly shaped the imaginative capacities of the Quebecois collectivity, especially those members of it who, like the authors studied here, were born before 1960. In an article published in 1985, Benoit Lacroix notes the surprising absence of any serious research on the traditional religious mythology of French Canadians ("La mythologie," 63). Lacroix argues that the Catholic religion was transplanted from Old to New France and that its transporters, the French religious communities, were directly inspired by the philosophy of the Middle Ages. This catholicity survived in North America until about 1960, without being affected by the major upsets - the three Rs - that touched European catholicity: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the French Revolution. PreVatican French Canadian catholicity, then, was traditional in the extreme. Lacroix further notes, in a patronizing tone, that the power held by the priests in the centuries after the fall of New France affected the worldview of the traditional French Canadian: "II ne se preoccupe pas trop des 'grandes verites' de la foi: croire n'est-il pas assez? 'Les pretres pensent pour nous.' Son sens historique n'est pas des plus precis: Adam, Abraham, Moi'se lui font penser aux ancetres de sa famille. La legende le passionne autant que 1'evenernent. II adapte, il transpose, il imagine a meme sa croyance; 1'affectivite du moment joue constamment dans sa maniere d'etre religieux. Dans un tel contexte, il est normal que la mythologie intervienne" (63). The religious monopoly over education and most aspects of social life in Quebec ensured that this traditional mythological worldview was known to most francophones. Although change occurred rapidly with the secularization of education during the Quiet Revolution, the novels examined here ironically illustrate the sway the traditional Catholic belief system exercised over a (still) relatively homogeneous Quebecois society. Despite his somewhat pedantic attitude, Lacroix is

45 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

one of the few critics who has set forth the blurring between matters religious and mythological in the worldview I am trying to describe. This blurring of religion, mythology, and narrative does not produce the "historyless" New World writing proposed by postcolonial writers such as Derek Walcott. These Quebecois novels engage history, but in so doing, they assume and then challenge a common mythicoreligious past that must be underlined in any comparative study. NEW WORLD MYTH

In all six novels under consideration here, there is a foregrounded awareness - and wariness - of biblical myths as having been an extremely strong force in shaping the traditional, inherited thoughtsystem that previously dominated the respective literary canons. The deliberate narratorial weakening of the status of both classical and biblical myths paves the way for the presence of a third form, New World Myth, which is, of course, the major focus of this study. Margery Fee notes that a frequent criticism levelled against the New World is "its lack of an indigenous mythology." Fee refutes this criticism, arguing that Howard O'Hagan's Tay John, a New World novel, is "filled with mythic power" ("Making New World Myth," 8).1? "Myth," Fee writes, "is used here loosely, as O'Hagan appears to use it... [it includes] a wide variety of conventional patterns: native myth and local legend; literary genres, modes, and archetypes; popular stereotypes; and even intellectual categories. All are or have been accepted widely and uncritically as true, and used as valid ways of viewing the world" (9-10). Fee shows how O'Hagan, in Tay John, rigs up a new myth out of the pieces of the old ones, revealing in the process how it's done. His "enemy" in this novel, then, is not myth, but the belief in one complete immutable myth: the Truth. It is impossible to think or talk without believing in something, starting from somewhere, standing on some taken-for-granted ground. But in Tay John those who refuse to shift ground, or to feel the ground shifting under their feet, are defeated, while those who wonder and doubt survive ... The world [O'Hagan] moves [the reader] into is filled with the elements of myth, but, unlike the Old World myth, immutable, authoritarian, timeless, and universal, his New World myth is rather a paradigm of myth, revealing how myth is created to suit a particular need in a particular time and place ... O'Hagan undermines various Western ideologies ... [and] shows how a borrowed indigenous myth can be adapted to immigrant needs in a way that will distinguish Canadian novels from others. (10)

46 New World Myth

Elsewhere in the article, Fee states that these "dominant and interconnected ideologies [are] idealism, Christianity, patriarchy, class, and capitalism" ("Making New World Myth," 9). She attributes the liberating quality of New World Myth to its self-regulated distancing from the dominant Judaeo-Christian worldview - a distancing that gives individuals the freedom to think and imagine for themselves. In her analysis, Fee notes that the process of rewriting myth begins with the importing of "a version of Judaeo-Christianity [the Christ story] and a version of Platonic idealism [the allegory of the cave] into the traditional beliefs of the Shusway tribe into which Tay John is born" (11). The rewriting process continues with O'Hagan's use and abuse of Amerindian and white settlers' stories to build his New World Myth of Tay John (13). O'Hagan, argues Fee, is attempting "to re-make not only Old World mythology, but also Old World literary genres, to suit the New World" (17). The coming-into-being of New World Myth is tied to the commonplace, and O'Hagan's tale "has a popular origin, being formed in the main by indigenous oral genres: myth, legend, tall tales, gossip, rumour, and hearsay" (11). In Tay John, therefore, myth "is not immemorial, immutable, and universal, but flexible, time-bound, and appropriate to its setting" (23). O'Hagan is engaged, proposes Fee, in a "process that Robert Kroetsch has argued is characteristic of recent Canadian fiction" (17). Kroetsch has written: "In recent Canadian fiction the major writers resolve the paradox - the painful tension of appearance and authenticity - by the radical process of demythologizing the systems that threaten to define them. Or, more comprehensively, they uninvent the world" ("Unhiding the Hidden," 239). Fee portrays Jackie Denham, the narrator of the middle section of O'Hagan's novel, as having what Kenneth Bruffee qualifies as a "European mind" (Elegiac Romance, 239). Denham, notes Fee, "spends the novel overcoming a kind of culture shock ... [He] must learn to change the European attitude that sees nature (and the associated women, native people and indeed, reality itself) as objects to be mastered" ("Making New World Myth," 18). Fee implies that for O'Hagan possessing a European mind is not advantageous and points to his attempt to remake Old World mythology and Old World literary genres. She further argues that the shift in narrators in Tay John makes "the reader aware that all narration is incomplete, and that stories exist independently of their authors." Fee's basic argument is that the novel moves "from certainty to doubt": "This is not to say that O'Hagan turns to radical irony. He wants us to believe in doubt, to make myths while understanding that they are of necessity inadequate, and will be replaced by versions of others ... Thus, this is a New World myth, egalitarian,

47 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

popular, practical, peaceful, agnostic. In that it rejects both Dobble's American and materialistic realism, and Denham's Anglo-Irish and aristocratic romance, it is also specifically Canadian" (20). Fee further develops the politico-cultural aspect of this last point, noting that the hero/ine of the new myth, the child of Ardith Aeriola and Tay John, will be "a mixture of her obscure Central European past, and his Irish-Indian heritage: a new Canadian" (23). Throughout the article, Fee argues that New World Myth, produced by the dismantling of the old myths, takes possession of a new literary and intellectual territory "formerly excluded from literature, the 'colonial'" (11). Discussing New World Myth in terms of the colonial situation and the need to use what is at hand in the overt construction of New World Myth, Fee notes that O'Hagan flouts "the dogmas of 'Imperial' criticism in creating a colonial myth. Denham trails behind him into virgin territory the whole European literary heritage, the dreadful burden of the colonial writer. Yet it proves fruitful. He supplies from local materials those things identified as lacking by critics like Rupert Brooke" (24). Brooke's infamous comment about the lack of mythology in the New World is frequently cited in postcolonial studies: "Look as long as you like upon a cataract of the New World, you shall not see a white arm in the foam. A godless place. And the dead do not return" (Letters from America, 155). Fee concludes that despite "'victories' over old ideologies, the survival of the myth is problematic ... [However, for] O'Hagan, the future is not simply determined by the past. In the precarious present, the moment of action, of 'promise,' clarity of vision can create a new and perhaps less oppressive myth" (24-5). It was in the context of Fee's analysis that I first defined New World Myth in my own work. Since this study concentrates on novels published much later than Tay John and as since these novels foreground their interest in historico-political situations in a way that the narrators of Tay John do not, many characteristics of New World Myth in my analyses are extensions rather than illustrations of those developed by Fee. For instance, New World Myth encourages a renewed interest in reclaiming the past, and yet flaunts its re-creation, through story, of that past in the here and now. Its emphasis on what Dennis Duffy terms the "malleability of material" (Sounding the Iceberg, 66), as well as the emphasis on the narrator as the creative teller of "untold tales that wait for their telling" (Kogawa, Obasan, 226), underlines the flexibility of New World Myth. The texts studied here explode the concept of a "commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history" (Waugh, Metafiction, 6) by their narrators' recreation of - and challenge to - the very notion of past reality and how we

48

New World Myth

know it. These novels contribute to what Patricia Waugh describes as a "sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures" (7). The presence of classical myth that Fee notes in Tay John is not an important factor in these historiographic works; indeed, there is a deliberate putting-aside of classical myth in many New World Myth novels. The political aspect of both the past and the "precarious present" receives more attention in these texts than it does in Tay John. In addition, the metafictional aspect is more strongly stressed in the later fictions, lending more weight to the discussion of the creative making of New World Myth. TERMINOLOGY AND NEW WORLD MYTH

As is the case with New World Myth, there is a potentially problematic tension in any usage of several terms that recur frequently in this study: fiction, history, reality, myth, mythology, and mythologization. Warner Berthoff's "Fiction, History, Myth" provides a basis from which to begin to define three of these terms and to explore the relationships among them. Berthoff assumes that it is possible to define precisely fiction, history, and myth and offers definitions that, in the context of this study, could be qualified as conservative or traditional. He posits that all three are modes of narrative, and he underlines their cognitive basis. A fiction, writes Berthoff, describes "something made up" by an individual maker, the author (269). A fiction is particular to this individual maker, and, if not made by him or her, it would remain "unknowable" (271). A fiction in this schema is an imagined narrative, a particular writer's invention. A history, according to Berthoff, is "that species of narrative in which we try to describe something that happened according to the discoverable testimony about it and by means of certifiable techniques for gathering and identifying such testimony" (270). Contrasted to a fiction, which is, Berthoff notes, "constitutive or inventive," this second type of narrative is descriptive. Whereas the critics' concern with a fiction revolves around its "veracity," their concern with a history centres on the problem of "verification" (272). Although Berthoff realizes that ambiguities develop with the concept of history, he thinks that "on the whole they are manageable ones ... History, in brief, is the story of happenings that are, or might be, otherwise knowable" (270-1). Thus, for Berthoff, a history is a narrative that is "meant to reveal a pre-existent order of actuality" (272). A myth, writes Berthoff, is a narrative that is "told," as opposed to "composed" (as is the case with a fiction) or "reassembled" (as is the

49 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

case with a history). We do not know the origins of myths; we do not know them as a making, only as a telling. There is "an element of unchangeability in the structure of the telling" of a myth that endows it with "the authority of the ritually stabilized" (276). Another characteristic of myth, claims Berthoff, is that it constitutes a "collective activity of uttering and re-uttering (with all manner of local, idiomatic variation) certain relatively unchanging formulas of statement" (277). A myth is stabilizing, "inseparable from ritual" (278), and has both an intimate association with religious life and, as Frye notes elsewhere, a "special category of seriousness" (Frye, "Literature and Myth," 28). Myths exist, states Berthoff, to bring "things that are known about ... into an order in which they will continue to exist and be serviceable" (281). According to Berthoff, then, the "basic function or purpose of myth is thus not explanation (in the sense of interpretation) but recovery, preservation, organization, continuance" (281). A New World Myth is something quite different. The frame of argument of Berthoff's article suggests that one can separate out and keep separate - fiction, history, and myth. In fact, Berthoff somewhat disapprovingly mentions "a certain over-confident waywardness and libertinism of imagination among post-modern writers of fiction," referring in passing to the work of Giinter Grass and Peter Weiss (272). Berthoff's approach clearly does not allow for any blurring of the boundaries among these three modes of narrative. Such a cut-and-dried system, however, proves to be inapplicable to the historiographic works discussed here, because in these novels there is a deliberate narratorial blurring of the boundaries of the fictional, the historical, and the mythical. Although these novels may claim to be fictional works, some of them are what Allen Thiher calls "not always fictional fiction[s]" (Words in Reflection, 190) whose concern is the creative retelling of actual past events. Thus, contrary to Berthoff's definition, the "event(s)" of the narrative would not remain unknown without the novel. The critics' concern with history, says Berthoff, is verification. However, the fictional retelling of historical events (with the only sometimes acknowledged filling-in of the gaps) brings fiction into the problematic realm of history and puts history into the equally problematic realm of fiction. In these works of fiction, verification can also be a concern. The incorporation by these novels of real historical documents is but one example of the numerous narrative techniques that add to this blurring of the boundaries and render fiction inseparable from history and "reality." These novels also "take on" history: they problematize the past, and they put forth their retellings as equal to, or superior to, those recorded

50 New World Myth

by the supposedly certifiable techniques of historical research. The very acknowledgment within these texts that their version is one version of the past (and that there are therefore other possible and perhaps equally acceptable versions) contributes to the generic blurring of the boundaries between fiction and history. The textual use of documents (trial records, letters, memoirs, descriptions of photographs) illustrates that these traditional aids to historical objectivity are only what the imagination makes of them. Berthoff's article offers a traditional concept of myth: an eternal, traditional, teleological, transhistorical narrative that lends shape, unity, and what Shirley Neuman calls "integrated wholeness" to the story (Kroetsch et al., Labyrinths of Voice, 129). However, as we shall see in greater detail in the following chapters, the ongoing crises in theories of historiography, of knowledge, and of fiction also have their equivalent in discussions of myth. To the postmodern list that includes "fiction" that is not always fictional, "history" that is not always an objective record of past events, and "knowledge" of the past that is relative, personal, and perhaps, "the ultimate fiction" (Waugh, Metafiction, 107), we may now add the concept of "myth" as comforting and disquieting, structuring and decentring, old and traditional, and new and generative. The other three terms that recur frequently in this study are "reality," "mythology," and "mythologization." With regard to the novels discussed here, "reality" refers to that which is traditionally outside fiction: simple, empirically verifiable facts that should be objective because they apparently leave no room for diverse interpretations or for necessarily biased assembly. Thus, a statement such as "Jovette Marchessault is the author of Comme une enfant de la terre" belongs to the realm of "reality." However, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a father whose name changes from John-marchait-eau to John Marchessault. Thus, this narrator brings reality into the realm of fiction and fiction into the realm of reality. Again, as W.J. Keith has noted, when the narrator of Rudy Wiebe's Scorched-Wood People tells of the shout "Vive le Nord-ouest libre!" during the celebration dance of the Metis (31), the phraseology is not politically innocent or, in all likelihood, historically accurate (Epic Fiction, 90); it incorporates de Gaulle's similarly phrased exclamation at another politically charged celebration and illustrates how narrative techniques can deliberately occasion a blurring between fiction and reality. Northrop Frye defines a mythology as a "definite canon of stories," a "body of traditional and religious data" ("Literature and Myth," 28, 31). He describes the process of mythologization as a movement downward: myths degenerate from stories about gods to stories about legendary heroes, to stories about human beings (Anatomy, 51). But

5i

Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

the narrators in the texts studied here are struggling against the domination of definitive mythologies, such as the biblical and the colonial-historical ones. Frye's tone, created in part by his frequent use of first-person plural pronouns, implies that these mythologies are "our" inherited traditions, our primary data for understanding our situation in the world ("Literature and Myth," 27). The narrators of the texts being considered in the pages that follow, however, challenge these "given" mythologies and address their self-imposed task: to mythologize at least their, if not our, past(s) in a manner appropriate to New World nations. By "mythologization" (and its verbal form, "to mythologize") I mean a deliberate according of the quality Hans Blumenberg calls "significance" to the characters and events in the texts: "[Myth] has something to offer that - even with reduced claims to reliability, certainty, faith, realism, and intersubjectivity - still constitutes satisfaction of intelligent expectations. The quality on which this depends can be designated by the term significance [Bedeutsamkeit], taken from Dilthey" (Work on Myth, 67). Although Blumenberg argues that "significance" cannot be defined, but only explained and that "Equipping something with significance is not something that we can choose to do" (68), I would argue that in New World Myth, where the emphasis is placed on myth-making, the narrators do set out to confer significance on the events and personages of the stories they retell. "Significance," in the context of this study, refers to a characteristic quality of certain stories, a quality that makes them important, notable, valuable, and of consequence. In these self-conscious fictions, of course, the according of significance is often ironically undercut by those who use it to mythologize individuals or historical events. In outlining the traditional definitions of the six terms just discussed, I have been working toward a fuller definition of New World Myth by suggesting that in the novels under scrutiny here there is a perpetual tension between the traditional definition of each term and the narrators' treatment of the concept. Similarly, the narrators instil a tension between Old World myths and their particular versions of New World Myth. They do this by actively working at breaking down the barriers between myth and history or fiction and by deliberately blurring the boundaries between what constitutes a myth and what does not. INDIGENOUS MYTH

The post-European fictional works discussed here use that which is at hand - that which is local - to create, underline, and ironically

52 New World Myth

problematize the significance of what which is being recounted. One difference between New World Myth and the perhaps more conventional use of myth in the modernist period is seen in Eric Gould's suggestion that James Joyce's re-use of motifs from The Odyssey is part of his work of "mythological plotting" (Mythical Intentions, 12). "In other words," writes Gould, "we undoubtedly have The Odyssey in mind as a working analogy for Ulysses, which is what Joyce intended, and Stuart Gilbert, T.S. Eliot, and everyone else confirms. We are not disappointed to find that Joyce's novel reflects, residually at least, the 'archetypal order' of the geography of Ulysses' quest" (140). Joyce's work, Gould implies, comes out of a strong tradition: his Ulysses assumes a general knowledge of The Odyssey and gives ample work, as Gould points out, to those critics who "see the business of reading as that of fitting together motifs and archetypes into a solution to a giant puzzle" (140). The general strength of such a literary tradition has been underlined also by Frye, who proposes that in "a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. He often has the feeling, and says so, that he is not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape" ("Conclusion," 1965, 836). In order to see the difference between this concept of tradition and the challenge to it by New World Myth, one could imagine a vertical pole with various types of myth placed on it in a hierarchical order. In the traditional literary scheme, classical stories would be at the top (important) end of the pole, while gossip, hearsay, and local-interest stories would occupy the bottom (frivolous) end. In New World Myth, however, this hierarchical order is challenged. Instead of having traditional myths come down from the heights to enhance an ordinary story and keep the paradigmatic original story alive in a contemporary form, the narrators of New World Myth novels make use of the elements situated at the base of the imagined vertical pole. That is to say, they emphasize what has frequently been dismissed as local colour or des histoires de village. Margery Fee insists upon the liberating quality of New World Myth and the important role of what she calls indigenous popular genres in its formulation. Examples of the latter are legend, the tall tale, gossip, rumour and hearsay - all of which inform the text of Tay John. This novel, Fee notes, "buries its references to 'high' culture in allusions and echoes that are not essential for its comprehension"; its author, in his creation of New World Myth, "turns from 'high' to Tow' cultural forms" ("Making New World Myth," 24). Laurent Mailhot makes approximately the same point in his overview, "Romans de la parole (et du mythe),"

53 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

where narrative fluidity is linked to orality and popular, local discourse (88). In Le Romancier fictif, Andre Belleau makes a different distinction between "romans du code et romans de la parole" in Quebecois literature (57-89). He too notes, however, that "romans de la parole" are usually first-person narratives by potential fictional authors whose interests concern real-life issues. As Romanticism rediscovered fairy tales in reaction to the Enlightenment, so, perhaps, New World Myth turns to indigenous popular genres, such as local stories, folk songs, and political slogans, in reaction to the influence of more traditional givens, such as classical myth and European worldviews, on the literatures of English Canada and Quebec. New World Myth also investigates what used to be generally called, in the context of myth criticism, "primitive" myth. This word has recently, and deservedly, fallen on bad ideological times, as have the anthropologists who contributed to its general usage in many fields.18 Prior to approximately 1960, however, primitive was the term generally employed to describe archaic or prehistoric examples of myth. Characteristics of this "primitive" myth are anonymity of authorship, freedom from the limitations of chronological time and physical space, a strong sense of tribalism and collective activities that reinforce bonding among members of the tribal collectivity, and belief in the magical and the occult. Georges Gusdorf's introductory chapters in Mythe et metaphysique give as good a description as any of this category. Gusdorf posits that in a primitive worldview, no distinction is made between the objective world of reality and the world of myth and that there is only "une lecture unique du paysage" (57). For the "primitive," writes Gusdorf, "la conscience mythique imprime directement son sens au reel vecu, sans que soit possible la moindre ambiguite" (68). Gusdorf further proposes that in the prehistoric period the individual is not distinguished - and does not distinguish himself or herself - from the group: "L'epoque prehistorique est le regne de rimpersonnalite. Les individus n'emergent pas de la masse. Le je est prisonnier de Von qui 1'englobe" (162). Good examples of the postmodern play with this primitive category of myth in contemporary Quebecois and English Canadian literature are to be found in large sections of Gerard Bessette's Anthropoides and Geoffrey Ursell's Perdue: Or How the West Was Lost. In the novels discussed in detail here, the notion of primitive myth is sometimes used to uncover and then to abuse inherited misconceptions. This is particularly the case in the novels by Barcelo and Bowering. Amerindian myths, however, are present without irony in Marchessault's work, reflecting her use of what is local, known (Marchessault is part Amerindian), in her production of New World Myth.

54 New World Myth

Story-telling is also a concern of this investigation of myth, especially as it relates to knowledge of the past in a New World context. The major part of Lyotard's Postmodern Condition is devoted to the present status of scientific knowledge in postindustrial societies, but his remarks concerning narrative knowledge are of relevance here. His salient points are the breakdown of the metanarrative, the decline of narrative per se, and the effect of this change on contemporary society. Summing up this part of his argument, Lyotard writes, "Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26). Using as an example a tale of a primitive Cashinahua storyteller, Lyotard suggests that it is "the preeminence of the narrative form in the formulation of traditional knowledge" that separates the "customary state of knowledge from its state in the scientific age" (19). Narrative, then, in the postmodern period - according to Lyotard - is no longer an important conveyor of knowledge. I would argue, however, that in the contemporary fictions studied here narrative - that is to say, story-telling - is linked to the problematic of the acquisition of knowledge in the postmodern age. There is indeed a refusal of "the great historical systems of the past" (Thiher, Words in Reflection, 200) in much recent fiction written in Quebec and English Canada. Accompanying this refusal, however, is an acceptance or, more appropriately, an exploration of precisely those narrative components that Lyotard dismisses along with his primitive storyteller. This shady, by examining the creative retellings of stories of past happenings in the context of the present, examines the role of story-telling in New World Myth, particularly in the context of its relationship to history and knowledge. In the novels under study here, the narrators explore a combination of the traditional markers of myth (such as cyclical structure, naming as a creative and magical act, and the poet as the voice of the gods) and postmodern play with various "indigenous popular genres" (Fee, "Making New World Myth," 24). This dual concentration works to produce the tension that is inherent in and generative of New World Myth. As we shall see, the narrators of these texts flaunt the paradoxes that arise from thematizing "primitivism" in a highly technological age, orality in a printed text, or storytelling as a means to knowledge in what has long been considered a rational, scientific society. Textual blurring of fiction, history, and myth frequently provokes a certain malaise. Historiographer Louis O. Mink, for instance, warns that "myth serves as both fiction and history [only] for those who have not learned to discriminate" and suggests that we not "forget what we have learned" ("Narrative Form," 149). It is possible, how-

55 Post-Modern Myth and Post-European History

ever, that, in going beyond the need to set up boundaries between fiction, history, and myth, the novels discussed here are in fact offering their readers a new cognitive tool: an alternative way of viewing the past as an imaginative, narrated construct. Kroker and Cook state polemically that "Jean-Francois Lyotard is ... wrong when he argues ... that we are living now in the age of the death of the 'grand recits/ [in] a post-historical period ... In fact, it's just the opposite. We're living through a great story - an historical moment of implosion ... [that] traces a great arc of reversal, connecting again to an almost mythic sense" (Postmodern Scene, 14-15). I would challenge part of this argument: the novels studied here do involve an eventual rejection of dominant historical systems - the metanarratives of Lyotard's work. Narrative as story, however, is alive and well in these texts: the "tales that wait for their telling" (Kogawa, Obasan, 226) are being told through the textual construction of New World Myth. Precisely because of their metafictional awareness and their particular construction of New World Myth, these texts offer their readers a fictional mythologization of history as a way of acquiring a necessarily provisional knowledge of the past(s). Although Paul Veyne and historians of the Annales school propose a historiography that would be different from the dominant histoiretmite-et-batailles mode (Comment on ecrit I'histoire, 31), many English Canadian and Quebecois historiographic metafictions of the years 1975-85 turn to precisely those periods of history that were periods of conflict: the Conquest, the Rebellions of 1837-38, the two world wars, the October Crisis, the referendum of 1980. This leads to a slightly different version of the question posed above: apart from the putting-aside of classical myth, the use and abuse of biblical myth, and the foregrounding of what Fee calls "indigenous" myth, is there anything new about New World Myth? In typical postmodern fashion, there is both an "installing" and a "subverting" process (Hutcheon, Poetics, 3) in novels of New World Myth. The installation process self-consciously enhances the significance of the historical characters and events being retold. It is in the second stage - the subverting process - that a clearer answer to the question posed in the last paragraph may be found. The subverting of the mythologization process keeps New World Myth from becoming fixed and rigid. This subverting process is linked to the metafictional aspect of these novels. It is also connected to the ongoing discussion, within the novels themselves, about the self-conscious power of the imaginative, creative act to influence our cognitive capacities and our basic attitudes regarding knowledge of the past.

56 New World Myth The "tellers" of the stories in these texts, by foregrounding the tensions between the historical past and the political present and by emphasizing and then deconstructing their own privileged position as narrators, contribute to the creation of a necessarily fluid New World Myth. They metafictively lay bare their acts of mythologization in the full knowledge that in this, our postmodern climate, the resulting mythology is and will be temporary, adjustable, and continually shifting. Denied, then, a traditional function of myth, which is to offer intellectual security in the form of an established, definitive worldview, the presence of New World Myth in these texts serves other functions. By overtly exploring - and challenging - the notion of what Eric Gould calls "mythicity" (Intentions, 3), the narrators of these historiographic metafictions encourage the liberation of the concept of myth from its traditional function and allow for its rejuvenating presence in the literature of the postmodern age. Margery Fee concludes her shady by noting the creation of "new and perhaps less oppressive myth" in "the precarious present" ("Making New World Myth," 25). Although not all contemporary fictions include the two factors necessary for the tensions that generate New World Myth the installing and the subverting processes - I would suggest that both are contained in the six novels analyzed here. New World Myth fills a need to reimagine the world in a post-European and postmodern manner.

2 Making Myths, Playing God: The Narrator in Jacques Godbout's Les Tetes a Papineau and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People

In Jacques Godbout's Tetes a Papineau (1981) and Rudy Wiebe's Scorched-Wood People (1977) the first-person narrators explode the concept of a "commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history" (Waugh, Metafiction, 6) by their comments on - and challenge to - the very notion of a single past reality. Through the narrators' treatment of important historical events, these texts explore the concepts of narratorial control, historical instability, and the fictional mythologizing of the past. Two central concerns here are the textual blurring of history and fiction and the ostentatious use of the narrators as myth-makers. Political history is a concern of many postcolonial texts. In rewriting eurocentric interpretations of past events that took place in the New World, postcolonial writers can partially repossess the past while remaining aware of the flexible nature of history. Not all New World writers, however, enthusiastically set about rewriting their pasts. For instance, Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet and essayist, sees the postcolonial rewriting of history as an endless spinning of wheels and has what might be called a mythic reaction against history: "The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force" ("Muse of History," 112). Walcott advocates "historylessness" - the clean-slate syndrome: "No history, but flux, and the only sustenance, myth" (118). Instead of adopting Walcott's approach, however, Godbout's and Wiebe's novels take on history, thereby illustrating a continuing concern with the nationalist stance discussed

58 New World Myth

in the previous chapter. By "nationalist," I do not necessarily mean pan-Canadian, which is the meaning intimated by Alan Twigg's brief description of Wiebe's novel: "The Scorched-Wood People (1977) is an account of Louis Kiel's Metis people struggling to retain a sense of communal integrity and political autonomy in the face of encroaching nationalism" (Twigg, For Openers, 207). Nor do I at all wish to suggest the negative meaning associated with the term and its homologue, "nationalism," in the 19903, after the ethnic conflicts in Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and Eastern Europe. As Peter Alter remarks, "the plethora of phenomena which may be subsumed under the term 'nationalism' suggests that it is one of the most ambiguous concepts in the present-day vocabulary of political and analytical thought" (Nationalism, 4). In Quebec and in English-speaking Canada during the period studied here, the concept of nationalism was generally taken as a positive quality, although in keeping with the intriguing nature of these areas and the peoples who inhabit them, it usually meant different things. For instance, during Centennial year (1987), while many Canadians invested great energy in Centennial projects (such as, for instance, creating community parks), Montrealers took great pride in Expo '67, seeing it as a celebration of Quebecois autonomy and a manifestation of Quebec as a nation of the world. Reflections on nationalism in the novels of this study are tied to a sense of belonging or not belonging, or both: they demonstrate strong interest in all aspects of a particular community, which is not necessarily the same thing as an ethnic group, a race, or the people(s) of a nation. The question of community is discussed below, but for the moment, suffice it to say that the narrators of Godbout's and Wiebe's texts deliberately refer to specific historico-political events in their investigations of New World Myth; they problematize the concept of history in order to permit the elaboration of alternative and imaginative perspectives on the past. New World Myth novels tend to foreground the use of a narrator (or narrators) in their stories and to flaunt the situational complexity of these narrators. For this reason, this study focuses on the narrators and narratorial intentions, as opposed to the authors, of these texts. The insistence on a first-person narratorial voice, as opposed to an epistolary form of address or an omniscient third-person narration to mention but two alternative narratorial possibilities - permits two elements to operate within the texts. First, the use of a narrator facilitates the illustration of self-reflexivity in a text: self-conscious narrators, by laying bare their story-telling techniques and by insisting on their own problematic and sometimes fractured natures, emphasize the arbitrariness of any story. Second, the presence of a narrator in

59 Making Myths, Playing God

New World Myth texts allows a reflection on the question of community, as narrators who (re)tell history are frequently taken as representatives, cultural custodians, or spokespersons of a given collectivity. The notion of community itself, as Zygmunt Bauman notes, has become a concern of postmodernists: "It is precisely because of its vulnerability that community provides the focus of postmodern concerns, that it attracts so much intellectual and practical attention, that it figures so prominently in the philosophical models and popular ideologies of postmodernity" (Intimations of Postmodernity, xix). The post-European focus of New World Myth narrators problematizes and investigates this notion of community, in various ways. Where do people find their identity? In the collectivite? In their ethnic group? In their gender? their geographical location? their individuality? Is there such a thing as a definite identity? How do different communities interact? Are there enemies to community? If so, are these enemies within or without - or perhaps both? One demonstration of the ironic dimension of the treatment of community in the two novels examined in this chapter is that Wiebe's narrator openly, and futilely, strives to construct a collectivity, while Godbout's narrators, products of what has become a stifling collectivite, strive to break out of the deeply engrained nationalist stance of the Quebecois chez nous (77), which has been defined by Micheline Cambron as "une ideologic ou la collectivite ... est conc.ue comme un 'nous' englobant" (Une Societe, 176). The omnipresent first-person narrator of The Scorched-Wood People, the Metis poet and song writer, Pierre Falcon, recounts the lives of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont and the rise and fall of their New Nation, an appellation that is capitalized throughout the text. In this retelling of the rebellions at Red River in 1869-70 and on the Saskatchewan in 1885, the narrator's sympathies lie with the Metis. Directly addressing the reader/listener, Falcon underlines his attempt, through his story-telling, to accord "significance" to the leader of the Metis: "Let me tell you immediately, Louis Riel was a giant. If God had willed it, he could have ruled the world. No, no, hear me out, and you will believe it too" (36). The conclusion of Falcon's narrative exemplifies the one-on-one tone of the entire story, as well as its nationalist and religious overtones: "That is all the story I can tell you. Our New Nation blossomed and faded for a few short months in Manitoba in 1869-70, it blazed up in 1885 and in less than two months died on the Saskatchewan. Our prairie vision was too strong ... O God I pray again, let our people not be confounded. Give them that faith again" (348-51). In Coral Ann Howells' words, this narrative "gives us the world of the Northwest Rebellion in

60 New World Myth

stories, making us relive the process and see the problematics of history in the multiple claims being made on/in the West in the 18705 and '8os. Wiebe does not deny History ... but what he does do is offer the chance for its creative revision" ("Wiebe's Art," 20). Of course, Wiebe also uses these stories of the past to convey the strong political tensions of the 19708 between the marginalized "West" and what it perceived as the powerful centre, even while calling it the "East." Godbout's novel Les Tetes a Papineau is a political allegory that comments on the state of affairs in Quebec at the moment of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association. As Stephen Slemon has argued, allegory can be an effective method of subversion for postcolonial challenges to any monolithic presentation of history ("PostColonial Allegory," 158). Godbout's use of allegory not only offers such a challenge to history, but it also illustrates the New World Myth challenge to dominant myths that shaped traditional cultural worldviews in Quebec. Bicephalic Charles and Francois Papineau are the main characters and the first-person plural narrators of the text. Unlike Kiel and Falcon, they are not historically authentic personages. Indeed, they are rather improbable creatures: Charles and Francois are the names of two heads joined at the neck and sharing a single body. Like Siamese twins with independent minds, emotions and discourses, they live an increasingly frustrating life, bound together physically and yet partial to different aspirations. Charles and Francois agree to have an operation that will unite their two brains, thereby giving them one head. The narrators decide to write a journal about their "evolution, jusqu'au scalpel" (28). Divided into eight relatively short chapters, their journal tells of their first twentyfive years in Montreal and the surrounding area. Their infancy deliberately recalls that of the Dionne quintuplets from Ontario, who in the 19303 were kept from their parents by the medical community and exhibited to the general public as a curiosity. The Papineau family ties are maintained, however, when the heads' parents, AlainAuguste and Marie Lalonde, kidnap them from the hospital, thereby saving them from a similar fate. Charles and Francois continually flaunt the particularity of their bicephalic condition and, at the same time, stress their monstrosity. The allegorical import of their two-headed existence has been noted in practically every review of the novel: "Charles-Francois Papineau symbolise le Quebec" (Alain Piette, "Les Langues a Papineau," 120). Although Piette and also Patricia Smart note that this double name might well be associated with the English-French conflict within

61 Making Myths, Playing God

Canada, both critics conclude that the heads are, in Smart's words, "plutot les cotes 'canadien' et 'frangais' de la psyche quebecoise" (Smart, "L'Espace de nos fictions," 27). Charles and Francois Papineau are indeed representative of the Quebecois collectivity. The tension they feel as they contemplate the operation recalls the situation in Quebec prior to the referendum of 1980. Their internal conflicts have obvious political undertones: "Aujourd'hui ... nous n'envisageons plus 1'avenir, ou ce qui en reste, de meme maniere. Nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, ideologiquement separes ... II n'est plus question de tenir des discours chacun de notre cote. Ce n'est plus le temps des elections. Nous n'en avons plus le courage. II nous faut faire face a la situation" (29). In the hospital room, their sister's question again underlines the political import of the operation, as well as their contradictory responses to it: "Et si nous tenions un referendum?" lance Bebee qui nous embrasse parderriere. "Pour trancher la question?" ... "Pourquoi voudrais-tu un referendum?" demande Charles. "Parce que vous ne vous appartenez pas tout a fait," repond Bebee. "Vous vous devez a votre public. Vous etes 1'orgueil de la Nation ..." "Dites, vous avez deja choisi? Dites-le-moi?" "Oui," repond Charles. "Non," repond Francpis. (145-8)

The final chapter of the novel consists of a letter written by Charles E Papineau to the prospective publishers of the heads' journal. Written in English, the letter explains that the operation produced a unilingual one-headed Papineau, thereby fulfilling the heads' prophecy that "les tetes a Papineau ... sont condamnes a disparaitre" (150). The political implications of the heads' complicated existence, then, are foregrounded throughout the text. Godbout and Wiebe have both emphasized the power of creative •writing to influence our understanding of the past. Godbout has said: "Toute entreprise d'ecriture est une entreprise pour masquer, transformer, transmuer les choses, et non pas pour les dire comme elles sont ... [Ecrire, c'est] Briser la chronologic, briser la representation" (quoted in Donald Smith, "Jacques Godbout," 54). For Godbout, then, writing is an act of transformation that is different from a direct chronological representation. The exterior presentation of his text as artifact thematizes its mythical and historiographic concerns. On the back cover of the original Seuil edition of the novel, CharlesFrangois Papineau is presented as a "real live person," complete with

62 New World Myth

definite birthdate (1955), birthplace (Montreal) and age (25). The "reality effect" to which this passage aspires is greatly strengthened by the fact that it first mentions the celebrated Dionne quintuplets and then leads on, without the slightest change in tone, to the existence of Charles-Francois, "le seul enfant a deux tetes qui ait survecu si longtemps."1 This phraseology implies that there have been other two-headed children, as there have been other sets of quintuplets. Instead of touting the novel as being worth its price, the entire publicity blurb emphasizes verisimilitude, the life of "les tetes": "Leur vie est un roman plein de contradictions et de surprises."2 The title of Joan Miro's painting reproduced on the front cover, "Le disque rouge a la poursuite de 1'alouette" (which was incorrectly attributed to Paul Klee on some copies), is doubly indicative of the political slant of this allegorical novel - the alouette being a traditional symbol of things French Canadian. "Papineau" recalls Louis-Joseph Papineau, the leader of the Patriotes during the 1837-38 rebellions. The adjective rouge traditionally described the rebels: Papineau is the "name of one of Quebec's most famous Rouges" (Kroller, "Two Heads," 112). As Piette argues ("Les Langues a Papineau"), the historical Papineau has undergone a process of mythification that makes of him a crystallized heroic figure of the past. The exterior presentation of the work, then, strongly suggests that its main characters, bizarre and fabulous as they may be, have a historical reality and occupy a particular time and place. This presentation also indicates that the text will discuss the historical and mythological discourses of Quebec. Indeed, the title of the painting on the cover indicates the action of the novel: the fictional Charles and Francois Papineau, while playing on the significance of their name, challenge the historical traditions of the Quebecois. They are, indeed, "a la poursuite de 1'alouette." Rudy Wiebe shares Godbout's view of writing as an act of transformation. The research he did for The Temptations of Big Bear enabled him to write The Scorched-Wood People at a faster pace, as he had already acquired a knowledge of the historical background of the period (Bergman, "Rudy Wiebe," 166). This common research is significant because of the prefatory address in Big Bear: "No name of any person, place or thing, insofar as names are still discoverable, in this novel has been invented. Despite that, and despite the historicity of dates and events, all characters in this meditation upon the past are the product of a particular imagination; their resemblance and relation, therefore, to living or once living persons is to be resisted." This passage is indicative of Wiebe's attitude to storytelling or, more appropriately, to story-making. As we saw in chapter

63 Making Myths, Playing God

i, Wiebe considers facts to be the raw material from which he shapes his story. This concern is reflected in the epigraph printed under the title of the hardcover edition of The Scorched-Wood People. Although no source is given, the epigraph is in fact modelled on the last stanza of a song composed by the historical figure Pierre Falcon.3 Ironically, Falcon's version comes to us as a translation of a written version of the oral story that Falcon is purported to have sung. Wiebe's epigraph, reprinted here, most closely resembles the version of "The Battle of Seven Oaks" (La Bataille des Sept Chenes) printed in Davis's Poetry of the Canadian People. And who has made this song? Who else but good Pierre Falcon. He made the song and it was sung To mark the victory we had won; He made this song that very day, So sing the glory of the Bois-brules.

As in the original (?) French text, the hearer/reader is being urged to participate. This work, then, may have the power to shape our perception of the way things were. Although - perhaps because - it is the product of a particular imagination, it can mediate between the reader and the past. In an effort to destabilize the traditional versions of past events, the narrators of The Scorched-Wood People and Les Teles a Papineau present themselves, as well as their stories, as a mixture of fictional elements and historical personages. In this way, they challenge the reality of their own existence, as well as the traditional version of the (hi)stories they retell. At the same time, and paradoxically, they stress the importance of their narratorial role and the seriousness of their textual productions. The historical and fictional worlds of the novels are inextricably bound together here. While shifting the focus in their retellings of the events of the past, the narrators of both novels selfconsciously blur fiction and history in their creation of New World Myth. The historical Pierre Falcon died in 1876, but Wiebe's Pierre Falcon is not bound by time or space as we know them. He is both in his fictional world and not in it. At one point, as participant, he is singing his "silly, ironic, ribald songs" (322); at another, as distanced observer, he is commenting upon the life of the twentieth-century Metis. Falcon breaks openly with the objective or neutral narrator convention. The articulation of his society and its leader is his poetic

64 New World Myth

- and political - function and the raison d'etre of this text: "During my lifetime I was given many songs, and I have often prayed to the Good Father ... I have prayed, give me to make this song of Kiel. You gave me so many songs ... Give me this song too ... 1 prayed for that for some years, and that song of Kiel was not given me until I lay on my deathbed" (140). The repetition of the pronoun "this" suggests that the text we are reading is Falcon's song of Kiel: with these written words, he is expressing the histories of his Metis people - even if it is done from his dwelling-place after death. The following passage, with its Romantic overtones of European feudal halls, illustrates the privileged position of the maker of this "song" as the articulating "voice" of the people: "Grandfather, how long must one live before he can speak for the dead?" "I am nearly old enough to sing for them," I said, and his glance leaped to mine. "You have made a new song for us." And I laughed aloud. To be known again, our Metis glory! All of a day's driving from White Horse Plains, and my head bulging once more with words and music and rhythm, I chuckled and laughed until they all thought I was at last truly crazy, feeling again after years all those wild sounds of frogs plains and words clashing and liberators and lords drinking their death in enormous halls that had spun in my head for half a century. "Yes, yes. You Metis boys have given me another song." (36)

This passage has been erroneously interpreted as an indication that Kiel is Falcon's grandson (Dueck, "Rudy Wiebe's Approach," 195). The term "grandfather," however, is commonly used in Canadian French to signal respect for the figure of the older person, the oral transmitter of knowledge about the past. In "Romans de la parole (et du mythe)," Laurent Mailhot remarks on the narratorial utility of the "grandfathers" that one finds in contemporary Quebecois literature: "[Us] sont moins des personnages (emouvants) que des moyens (efficaces). Plutot que de parler d'eux, et meme de les faire parler, la narration passe par eux. Us font le pont entre 1'icimaintenant du conteur-scripteur et 1'ailleurs-autrerois du mythe" (86). Wiebe's use of the bard figure as the elderly, wise, representative voice of a chosen people reflects the liberal humanist attitude toward the artist's role in "nation building." It also makes use of the notion in traditional myth criticism of the inspired artist as the holder and guardian of the tribal history and mythology. In this, it illustrates the postmodern tension in New World Myth novels: even while Falcon is striving in every way to establish the collective myth

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